Drupal (linux)- articles should be auto promoted to top of front page?

I just began this Drupal Basics course. I am running Drupal-8.2.4 on linux, which seems installed properly. I am attempting to create my first few articles in my first test site (just placeholders, not real content).

According to Diane Douglas (the instructor), newly created articles should be automatically placed at the top of the home page, provided that:

1) the "default front page" is blank under "Basic site settings" (i.e. does not contain an alias or path/filename) 2) the article has no alias under the articles "URL Path Settings" 3) the "Promoted to front page" box is checked under the articles "Promoting options"

I am not seeing this behavior. I create the articles as above and can see that they are published, but they don't automatically appear on the front page (or anywhere). My Welcome page is just a simple page in a "menu link", so it is unrelated to the issue at this point. The two test articles I created are simply nodes not connected to anything-- I can see them with localhost://site/node/3 and localhost://site/node/4. There are no errors.

I have cleared the browser cache, logged in and out, etc with no change.

So, am I missing some instruction or configuration setting? Has the "Promoted to front page" option somehow changed its behavior for version 8 (the video discusses a slightly older version). The Linux version has seemingly only cosmetic differences (in terms of configuration and gui).

To clarify, my front page at this point simply shows my login and the tabs I created (About, Home, Welcome) and the other regular details-- site name, slogan, search box, home and add content buttons, etc. The two articles I created are not being auto promoted to the front page as I expect they should.

Thanks if you can shed some light onto this for me :-)

Keith

*** EDIT: TM over at the Drugal users site forum helped me with this. The solution for me is to make the default front page (under Basic site settings) "/node". After doing this everything seems to work as it should with articles auto promoted to the home page. Not sure if this is needed because I'm running Linux or due to my running Drugal-8 or maybe a bit of both...