I know that you said you don't want a premade kit and following instructions and this is *close* to that... but I think it might still be a great fit.
Mark Rober has a new product where they ship a new robot every 2 months. They give you the basic instructions on how to build/program it but the idea is that you take that knowledge and then expand on it yourself by adding features. My daughter is still a little too young for it so I haven't used it personally. The biggest issue is that it is a subscription and not a one time purchase.
We got this for our youngest. Can confirm that it's easy to follow and absolutely encourages exploration of the post build abilities or modifications. Mark is doing great things for kids science. Phat Gus caused my middle child to start exploring zoology as a career!
Also, the subscription is worth it even if a single purchase option would be nice just to try things out. Go ahead and do it if your kid is at all interested in hardware, robotics, or tinkering in general.
I had a really bad experience with crunchlabs. They silently renew your subscription without any warning, which is really bad form in 2024, and they didn’t have an option for cancelling online, forcing you to call a call center which took over an hour just to get someone on the phone and then they had the gall to try high pressure tactics to get me to not cancel. Left a really bad taste in my mouth.
This is exactly true, unfortunately: proprietary tooling that costs an absolute fortune, and has a UI straight out of the very worst of the 1980s, and only works on very select proprietary platforms, is absolutely the norm with hardware work.
The Crunchlabs agent seems to be based off the Arduino Agent, so I'm surprised they don't support Linux.
My teenager never had any issues with using Linux since the age of 10 (old laptop with Firefox and Minecraft), and never used Windows (school uses Chromebooks). Hopefully this works with just a standard editor too, although the Crunchlabs IDE looks nicer for learning.
Mark Rober has a new product where they ship a new robot every 2 months. They give you the basic instructions on how to build/program it but the idea is that you take that knowledge and then expand on it yourself by adding features. My daughter is still a little too young for it so I haven't used it personally. The biggest issue is that it is a subscription and not a one time purchase.
Here is the link: https://www.crunchlabs.com/products/hack-pack-subscription
And here is a brief video explaining how it expands beyond the normal "premade robot kit." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtdOdUi9b_s