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?
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