Or if you want to make them tech capable, another possibility is to give them a cheap Mac (apparently Apple is going to release a MacBook with an A-series SoC s

Or if you want to make them tech capable, another possibility is to give them a cheap Mac (apparently Apple is going to release a MacBook with an A-series SoC soon). You can open a terminal and show how it works, they can explore the filesystem with Finder, but when they need to do school work, they also have access to good DTP applications (Swift Publisher is really affordable and nice for kids), Affinity Designer/Photo, etc. Our daughter initially had a Linux machine (also for the reasons you outlined). But she quickly ran into issues when doing work for school, collaborating with other kids, etc. So we gave her a Mac Mini M1. It was not very expensive, she can run many common apps (MS Office is a fact of life) and it's more secure (app sandboxing, sealed system volume, etc). But many of her skills are be transferrable to Linux if needed (in contrast to using an iPad or Android tablet).