[piyush_soni]

I'm totally for computer tinkering, but at the age of learning something like 'MIT Scratch' or even C/C++/Python, if they have to deal with all these problems, a lot of potential computer scientists might actually get discouraged and end up giving it all up thinking 'Computers' are very difficult.

[thealienthing]

This is a valid concern, but one thing I find is that using the more modern walled garden OSS like Mac and windows can be prohibitively abstract and difficult for getting into programming. On Mac, you need Xcode installed before you can even run GCC. And I believe you have to jump through similar hoops for windows. They try to rail you into using a complicated IDE like Xcode of Visual Studio when all you need is a text editor and GCC on Linux. It’s got a learning curve as a daily OS, but give a kid a raspberry pi and everything they need to write and run some python or C++ is pretty much there. You can sit down with them for the setup but they won’t need you after it’s set up and they will have a lot to look at before it comes time to get into the weeds with IDEs, make files, system dependencies etc. no solution is perfect (Linux included) but I find the ready to rock state of a fresh Linux distro to be pretty helpful to getting a developer going.