Junkdata

I dont blame em for going with that decision. Maintainer/devs are also wearing customer service/ PR and bookeeping hat on top of the things they build. Things cost money, especially time, call it greedy or not but people have to pay housing and food. Its tough and similar to a lot of industries, nobody cares until something goes wrong. All the best to this person 👍

Several things with this.

1. introducing programing and linux are two seperate things, though they do bridge when running linux, it would be asking em to learn one or the other. ( offer something already easy linux distro, to learn linux passively while focusing on programing.

Resources:

Learn linux TV - playlist available for linux and programing

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxQKHvKbmSzGMvUrVtJYnUA

Unfa - learn linux and music production

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAYKj_peyESIMDp5LtHlH2A

Good audio recording program thats free Ardour ( if he becomes good and makes a living on it, pls donate to the devs)

Learn programing for free Freecodecamp.org

If you are in the US. Ask the college/university for taking walk ins for classes. They allow you to attend classes for free to check out if you want to be a student. Depending on the school there will be no limit. ( honestly tech fields are mostly certifications and experience; a degree with student loans not necessary)

Local library, ive found books for programing languages to check out, use the cities resources.

Conclusion

All these options mean nothing unless the person does it and applys. You need to accept that no matter how much you suggest/guide/offer , that at the end of the day the choice is theirs. Especially at an age that wants to figure things out on their own.

Best of luck.

As someone who works with tech, here is my 2 cents on basic knowledge.

If your computer is "not working" restarting the computer can generally fix 80 percent of the issues. We are not trying to make you mad, this is literraly first thing I am doing if you present me a problem.

Stop downloading things from unknown sources.

Use generic effects/fonts on your powerpoint. Just because you bought something cool doesnt mean it will magically transfer when you pass your presnetation to another computer for your presentation. (Microsoft does not migrate your paid effects)

For gamers Stop playing pvp on your pc/console on wifi, are you a mad?

Everyone in general We are at an age of computers. Learn how to type, it will save you tremendous amount of time, literally.

As an example, i use mint as the base of my kvm/qemu virtual machine since i run an arc 380 on base and nvidia gpu for the guest. I made the mistake of updating my experimental kernel and forgot to set quiet and mint menu on grub to select the kernel at boot time. I popped in the install disc i had used previusly and fixed it by using the inlcuded programs to edit the grub and undo my kernel update. Fixed and i saved a timevault snapshot of the fix in case i mess up again. Linux mint saved me from reinstalling my entire os from a simple mistake.

Most desktop enviornments work with most distros. There will be a selection of linux users that say it doesnt matter because though its true you can make any distro look like each other. The navigations can change depending on the distro you use. I agree with most of the comments here, since you are starting out, mint is a solid choice. You get the backings of ubuntu, + its very user frienldy. A gui for packages/drivers and good sweep of software for daily usage. Im using it now since my arc 380 gpu is supported on it to use as the host for my virtual machines. ( i virtualize other distros/BSD and windows [for those pesky windows only games/programs])

Im wanting my friends to try out linux, they are all windows normies. This is pretty aggressive approach. I applaud the enthusiasm, maybe there are some people who respond. Id try my own way by finding a distro that best suited to their use case. All an all, someone is doing linux spreading to the masses and at least we can call that a win.