Its up & running. I was thinking about a more windows like desktop for him, but had mixed feelings about that. He is young and adaptable. I might let him choose his own path. I am an old unix guy. Not an SA, but something I always had to do. I’ve used aux, hpux, BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, Redhat and a few others that I forgot. I have android devices too. I use Linux mostly at work and never change much there. Too many rules, standard images and security policies. Other work always needs done and I guess I’m more of a command line kinda guy. Lol!
Yep, me too... my dayjob workstation is CentOS with a Win7 VM for those pesky Windows-only business office apps, but I'm quite familiar with all the variants you mention, save for AIX. NetBSD is my favorite of those flavors, but since my central home machine is a Mac Mini with VMs of everything else, I've gotten pretty comfortable with the BSD under that hood as well. There's usually two xterms up for every GUI window on the desktop... Cygwin saves my sanity every day on Windows.
Hey did you hear that Windows PowerShell is finally going to get native OpenSSh support? It's a miracle!!
Please do let me know how the Ubuntu settles in -- I think you (and your son) will like it.