Introduce him to game development with Godot engine. I don't know any specific tutorials, but you should be able to find something on YouTube.

You can also introduce him to the Free Software movement: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM

I started my embedded engineering journey by blinking an LED on a PIC microcontroller back in 2007. Maybe you can toss them an Arduino development board. Programming by itself could be boring and tedious, but seeing your program actually do things in the real world could be exciting, at least it was for me. There's so much to branch to from there, everything from industrial automation to vehicle navigation to robotics.

I think show him some of the cool stuff that you’re able to run on your server and see if he finds it engaging. You can let him know that someone on Lemmy (me) was able to build a career in the tech sector by being entirely self taught. I only took a handful of college classes on a GED because some of my high school credits weren’t going to transfer when changing schools. I was able to go a long way on just hard work and personal interest.

Of course, this only worked out because I was genuinely passionate about the field. If he doesn’t find computers fun it’ll take a lot of hard work and I defer to suggestions from another poster who offered links.

Several things with this.

1. introducing programing and linux are two seperate things, though they do bridge when running linux, it would be asking em to learn one or the other. ( offer something already easy linux distro, to learn linux passively while focusing on programing.

Resources:

Learn linux TV - playlist available for linux and programing

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxQKHvKbmSzGMvUrVtJYnUA

Unfa - learn linux and music production

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAYKj_peyESIMDp5LtHlH2A

Good audio recording program thats free Ardour ( if he becomes good and makes a living on it, pls donate to the devs)

Learn programing for free Freecodecamp.org

If you are in the US. Ask the college/university for taking walk ins for classes. They allow you to attend classes for free to check out if you want to be a student. Depending on the school there will be no limit. ( honestly tech fields are mostly certifications and experience; a degree with student loans not necessary)

Local library, ive found books for programing languages to check out, use the cities resources.

Conclusion

All these options mean nothing unless the person does it and applys. You need to accept that no matter how much you suggest/guide/offer , that at the end of the day the choice is theirs. Especially at an age that wants to figure things out on their own.

Best of luck.

Can you share your physical location with people? Maybe someone around your area (lol) that is already in the field can later on have a chat with him / push him into some tech related event and have him see the other side...

Personally I've stopped trying to get people to use open source software or Linux if they don't seem really interested. That saves me time, and that saves them time as well. I've seen several people being somewhat interested but going back to Microsoft or Google products after some time. Regardless of that, if they are open to testing Linux on an old laptop, why not show them a few Linux distribution by means of Ventoy ?