Very interesting, thanks!
The Gathering was really the spark that make the dance music scene take off in NZ. By around 2000 there were events happening all over the country and there was less need to trek to the middle of nowhere for a festival. The initial enthusiasm and idealism that energised the early days started to fade so money was needed then suddenly it's a much harder game.
National wouldn't have done this. Luxon is a evangelical.
Ubuntu or Mint are among the most noob-friendly.
But probably the biggest impact will be whether you go with Gnome or KDE. KDE is more Windows-like so could be a softer landing.
I've read a lot of stories where installing Linux resulted in less support calls, not more. It depends on how ambitious the user is - if they're mostly just staying in their lane and browsing the web it should be rock solid.
80% of the time, compiling something from source is just a matter of downloading the code, opening a terminal and changing to the directory containing the source and running these commands:
./configure make make install
It's the same 3 commands, 80% of the time.
Installing the prerequisites can be tricky, if the docs are lacking.