Learning Magento, what version to install?

[JacobSeated]

Hallo people, this forum has been a help and inspiration before, so lets see about this one..

I am in the situation that I promised my boss to try and learn Magento, possibly with the aim to help out with development in the future.

Now I just depleted my mental energy from trying to get the Elasticsearch Service, as offered by AWS, to work.
I was unable to connect from my EC2 instance (even with the WAN IP approved in the security group).

Then I noticed today that AWS has a pre-configured 2.3 Magento option for Lightsail — which is really tempting for me at this point — but that's without Elasticsearch.
My understanding is that Elasticsearch will be required from now on, so the question is if I should just go ahead and install 2.4 manually on lightsail, with a localhost ES?

The idea was to launch a Lightsail instance and then install Elasticsearch on it, either as an external service, or together with Apache and MySQL.
My existing EC2 instance already has too much stuff running on it, and I also fear it has too low memory for all these services to run reliably without swapping.

For now, I will just try their 2.3 setup, as I am really just interested in getting something to work before tomorrow.

[JacobSeated]

On second look, this pre-configured box is not usable to me, since I need to learn to use Bitnami as well, and the paths are also non-standard, so I have no idea where to find the files I need to edit.

An old fashioned LAMP install is just so much easier to work with for me. I wasted a lot of time trying to just get it to work with a domain name instead of the bare IP address.

Guess that settles my doubts.. Will go for the latest version, with a manually installed Elasticsearch. Strange that I find this much easier than all this auto-installer stuff...