My wife is still on Mac OSX, but my son has embraced Mint. I’m a bit cheesed off that there aren’t (obviously) many kid friendly programming tutorial resources, other than maybe getting a sub to codeacademy. Other than that, all good.

This is an exceptional write up, thanks!

I started with Mint and it was very simple to set up. I don’t really like the DE though (personal preference, I’ve used OSX for over 10 years). From your description it sounds like I can change Cinnamon to something else - is this fairly straightforward to do?

I’m looking to use the machine as a photo processing platform (from film and digital) and finding alternatives to Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop… with a view to ultimately having a NAS and cloud backup once I get to it.