Nothing inspires curiosity more than making something forbidden.
That kid is gonna find out ALL KINDS of information that his dad doesn’t want him to know about from his peers. Some of it good, most of it inaccurate, but you go ahead, dad.
Age old discussion
I’ve had great success with Garuda Linux. I’m running the KDE “Mokka” version.
It’s quite opinionated, so be aware of that, but it’s been very reliable on my HP laptop (it even has hibernation support!) and the built-in apps are top notch.
Just be aware that Arch-based distros tend to shun things like Flatpaks in favor of their own repositories and the Arch User Repository (AUR), and there aren’t any friendly point and click app stores like KDE Discover or GNOME Software. You will have to install apps using the command line or tools like Octopi, which is great if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but terrible for app discovery.
Since I mostly use Flatpaks, I installed Bazaar. You can install Discover, but it only works for Flatpak.
I used to run Manjaro, but after it left two of my computers in an unbootable state after an upgrade a few years ago, I moved on.