Notamoosen

Wanted to chime in again with this article I found that may give you some starting points.

https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-laptop-for-writers

There’s pros and cons to both platforms and there’s plenty of people willing to argue each side. I wouldn’t necessarily focus on this as much as trying to find the laptop she’s most physically comfortable typing on. Also for an aspiring writer you may want to look into a screen that’s easy on the eyes over long periods.

It depends on what you are trying to learn. If it’s just using it as a desktop then it’s more a matter of just using it for a while to change your muscle memory from Win or Mac.

If you’re looking for more of a command line/server experience, most distros have excellent documentation. This may be a minority opinion, but I personally like Oracle Linux (a Red Hat clone) and their documentation; https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/oracle-linux/index.html

I also like FreeBSD which isn’t technically Linux but very similar in a lot of regards. They also have excellent documentation; https://docs.freebsd.org/en/

Ultimately, which distro you wind up liking is entirely subjective and one of the great aspects of the open source world. Oracle in particular you may see a lot of hate towards, but I’ve always had good success with their products and support. Best of luck!

Try not to look at it as getting a $100 of technology, but rather if you’d get $100 dollars of entertainment out of it.