Best flavor of Linux for beginning-ish coder?

Parent Cafe
1

I have a daughter starting high school in the fall, and she’s quite interested in programming—she’s done all sorts of online self-teaching, she builds little games using online coding environments for her younger sisters, and so on. She’s expressed an interest in learning to work in Linux, and also learning to program apps for tablets. As a result, I was thinking of getting her a fairly inexpensive Linux box (probably a laptop) for Christmas to install the Android SDK on and let her play with it from there.

So: If I do this, which flavor of Linux should I get on it for her to start out with? I’ve heard good things about Mint, but I have no experience with it myself. Possibly important: She hasn’t really used Linux before, except for booting into Ubuntu from a USB drive but getting frustrated with the limitations that placed on working with it. (Our computers at home are Macs and a Chromebook, and she actually does most of her homework on the Chromebook.) Also, she’s probably going to want to create/edit visuals, including video, of various sorts, and I know from my own research that some versions of Linux are better than others for this, but again, I have no experience in this to know for myself.

Thoughts from the hivemind?

2

Ubuntu is probably one of the easier ones to install. Running off a USB drive without installing does have limitations, as you presumably found. Generally, installing an OS is easier if the OS is newer than the hardware. Some computers may come preinstalled with Linux. The desktop environment (Gnome, KDE, etc.) may make a significant difference in terms of personal preference with respect to usability. Here is an article about choosing a laptop for Linux use: http://www.howtogeek.com/185286/how-to-buy-a-laptop-for-linux/

Note that MacOS 10+ has a Unix-like operating system behind it, so it can provide a somewhat similar programming environment to Linux (though the desktop environment will differ).

3

Apologies since this doesn’t really answer your question. But if your daughter wants to get started before you get the Linux box and/or school starts back up she could just use the Mac (which is built on Unix) for now. There are some nice tutorials that teach command-line and shell scripts basics on a Mac … . Just don’t let her learn logged in as root :slight_smile: However, your daughter may be beyond this already.