I will give you that Linux is needlessly complex due to undesirable issues, but that's the price of admission for a highly hackable system, since there are no serious alternatives. As for kids, I wouldn't underestimate them. If what you want to give someone is a rich and deep experience with computers, it's about all you have right now.
On the other hand, and I'm sure this part of my comment will go over swimmingly here, but I imagine... if you start kids out with iPads, what they learn is not that doing interesting things with their computers is challenging, but that it costs a monthly fee.
But I'm not going to let her have one when she's older. I now realise that I would love a Linux tablet. Not a small laptop, but a touch tablet, thin, with a light keyboard too.
Is there such a thing out there? Or should I start building one now?
I pointed out that Linux was the perfect OS for this and your reply was that you hate using Linux on your corporate job because you have to do all those things. I mean fine you can hate it, it's not right for your job, OK. But in addition to being negative, you were off-topic. It spawned a bunch of guys debating the merits of Linux in a corporate office which is not the freaking topic of the blog post and to the extent you want to rattle on about it, you're arguing with a straw man. It shouldn't be a huge surprise you got flak. Sorry if this comes across as elitist but in the context of what this post was about I don't really care that Linux sucks in your office, I did not suggest you should use it there.
What Linux won't do is shove mass shootings and Tiktok ads down his son's throat. Again I quote the post: "What the actual fuck? That kid is 10, and TikTok is one of the things I am actively trying to prevent from getting into his world as long as possible." I maintain: Linux sounds great for this guy and his son.
RHEL (and its kin) is a stable server OS. Some organizations that have Linux-based desktops or laptops then also use it on those, perhaps for the sake of homogenisation. But the longer release cycle and conservative update policies that in part make it a stable and predictable server OS also mean that hardware support may lag by years.
This is always a topic on which people will have different experiences. Some people will have everything just working. That's perhaps most likely when the hardware has been chosen with compatibility in mind in the first place. In that case it can be pretty smooth sailing with little tweaking required and with things just working, especially compared to how it used to be, which is probably one reason why people react to claims of endless tweaking being required.
Other people will have hit a rough spot, and those certainly still exist particularly with non-specifically picked hardware, especially if that hardware is newer than the distro release.
CentOS is probably not representative of most people's experiences of running Linux on a desktop or laptop, though.
"I want him to be able to dig deeper. To explore. To try things out, misconfigure, crash, fix, and re-install. To get a feeling for how things work below the surface and how they do not work. To learn how to type fast and efficiently. To create things. Maybe, one day, even to learn how to code if he's interested."