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Important Concepts
If this is your first foray into building live distros, there are some terms and concepts we need to understand first. This will simplify the process later on.
Terms
An operating system is what your programs (email client, web browser, etc.) run on.
There are two basic types of booting systems that communicate between the hardware (the physical computer itself and its components) and the operating system: BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) which has been around for quite some time and the newer UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). Don’t worry, you don’t need to memorize what they’re acronyms for and there won’t be an exam- just remember that BIOS is an older technology and UEFI is the newer one- and that they operate differently.
GNU/Linux, sometimes just referred to as Linux (And there is a difference between the terminologies, but it’s nuanced. You are welcome to read up on it though!), is an example of an operating system. Other examples include Windows, macOS (previously OS X), iOS, Android, and a whole slew of others.
A live distro, live CD, live DVD, live USB, and the like are a way of booting an operating system without installing it on the hard drive- this means the computer doesn’t even need a hard drive installed, or it doesn’t matter if the operating system is broken. Typically they are Linux-based, but there are several Windows-based live releases out there (usually they’re focused on rescuing broken Windows systems, so they’re not very flexible).