Coming from windows, Linux mint cinnamon will be very familiar to him. It also runs games well, being based on Ubuntu.

I ran an older Nvidia card an currently a new amd card on Linux mint without problems. I suggest you try it out first using a live install on a USB stick.

I’ve written thousands of lines of untyped python code for a system (still) used daily by hundreds of users, handling time critical as well as financial data. It made the company I worked for millions and it worked. Was it bug free? Nope, bugs would appear in production from time to time, but they were very easy to detect, and very quickly solved, especially because of the fact that python is an interpreted language. In 7 years of working on that application there was only one bug that caused data corruption and required us to reprocess some data that took a day or three. That was the worst thing to happen in the entire lifetime of that codebase. I totally agree that if you structure your code properly, log properly and give your developers the trust and permissions to actually solve stuff in production quickly, you might even get a competitive advantage.