Four months ago, Mike, I was in the same boat. Luckily I found a youtube video by BuildElectronicCircuits that shows the step-by-step directions needed to create a schematic, assign footprints to packages, build the netlist for the circuit, and then lay out traces on copper clad board.
The URL for the video is listed at
The through-hole circuit is about as simple as you can get–an LED, a resistor, and a battery.
I first created this demo. in kicad 4.0.7.
Then later I upgraded to kicad 5.0.0 and then to 5.0.1. The thread I mentioned is my question about finding existing packages. Several package names changed from 4.0 to 5.0. They became longer and more descriptive of the actual geometry.
The main thing, however–the work flow between 4.0 and 5.0 changed only minimally.
Rene_Poschl and Sprig guided me out of the woods and onto the sunlit meadow of success.
So you might want to give it a whirl too. The circuit should turn out the same regardless of what OS you are using.
I later made a prototype of that PCB.