Which Linux version to choose for a 9-year old?

My 9-year old daughter is getting her first laptop. But which OS should she get started with?

I have been using various versions of Ubuntu as my main OS for around 5 years now, currently using Ubuntu Studio on my main laptop. This distro is based on XFCE, a very lightweight yet versatile OS. The reason for choosing Ubuntu Studio over the regular XUbuntu was to get a bunch of music apps by default. I haven’t been able to explore these as much as I wanted to, unfortunately, primarily due to everything happening at our new centre (RITMO) and master’s programme (MCT).

Even though I like Ubuntu Studio myself, it is not a distro I would install on my daughter’s machine. Buying a new computer with Windows 10 pre-installed, one could argue that it would be best to leave her with that. This may also help her to be more familiar with the computers they are using at school, which run Windows 7 at the moment. But the question in the store about whether I wanted to buy some antivirus-software with the new laptop, was enough to ensure me that a Linux distro would be a better choice.

I have heard that some people like distros such as Edubuntu for kids, but it does not seem to be maintained? After thinking about it for a little while, I have concluded that it is probably useful for a kid to learn to use a normal OS. If you compare how things were a decade or two ago, most modern-day OSes are comparably easy to use anyways.

Finally I decided to make it simple, and installed the regular Ubuntu distro based on GNOME. It looks “modern”, has large icons, and is fairly easy to navigate due to the streamlining of menus, and so on.