I ran a similar test and got completely different results. My girlfriend (hair stylist/artist) with zero coding background mentioned a Telegram bot idea. I asked "Why not build it yourself?"
I gave her a Windows laptop, but she said she wanted what I have instead. So I handed her a USB stick and told her she was on her own now.
Fast forward: she now runs Arch Linux with Hyprland (I use Xorg/i3 though), fully riced with cats. I only interfered on partitioning to preserve my data. She even installed Steam and got Portal running (that was her "watch this" flex after I told her not to even try). She pulled all of this off using a free-tier Gemini chat.
For the bot, a friend gave her a Kimi 2.7 key. She set up their harness and built a working bot in a matter of days. She even got a free Oracle VPS for deployment, though I stopped her there to check security first (still haven't had time, unfortunately).
She uses that laptop daily now and says she enjoys it over Windows by a mile.