Let's remember that the Codestarter is giving these laptops to kids who are basically just learning how to use computers. 1) I think Ubuntu is a great choice a

Let's remember that the Codestarter is giving these laptops to kids who are basically just learning how to use computers. 1) I think Ubuntu is a great choice as the first Linux distro because of its popularity: that means there is a large community of people in the Internet who can help and there is already so much information written about different common issues one might encounter. 3) Because gaming is fun and Minecraft has shown its capabilities also as an educational platform so I feel it's always better to provide a way of learning that is also fun. Kids learn by playing all the time and when we can slip in a few educational aspects into gaming, all the better. 4) I don't think introducing things like C or functional languages would be doing such great things when teaching kids to learn to program. Yes, programming is much more than just "stupid hello world programs and writing silly kiddie games" but languages like Python and Ruby are completely valid choices for writing real stuff, especially in the web app world (think of Django and Ruby on Rails). Also, it is easier to get started with languages that provide things like REPL to play with without having to first learn how to compile stuff just to get basic stuff done. It lowers the barrier of entry. 5) I don't think man pages are such great resource for people who are just learning stuff they have never dealt with before. They are really compact and even bit cryptic way of displaying the information (and not saying that is a bad thing, once you learn it, they are great, but it shouldn't be a priority when learning programming). 6) I don't know how often you have seen people try to start using vim or emacs? When people struggle even exiting an application, it's not the most welcoming experience. Again, having editors like Sublime Text or Atom lowers the barrier to start doing because you can focus on the most important part - learning how to program - instead of wasting time to learn your tools, which you can do later.