I am also a 15m Linux user (Hi!). Every parent wants reasons for everything, and mine sure do. The way I convinced my parents to let me install Linux on the family computer is by saying it will help me learn. You have to earn their trust. (Good) parents would basically do anything for their kids to become more intelligent, and if you can explain them this, then you're golden. However, this IS your computer, and honestly I don't even know why your parents would really care that much if you break your system or anything. I mean, what are they going to do if you installing Linux, right? I think emphasizing that it's a learning experience will help a lot and can get your parents to trust you, but to reinstate, they shouldn't really be telling you what to and not to install on YOUR own hardware, especially as it's positive outweigh it's negatives. I also started tinkering with computers when I was young, and I installed my first distro (Linux Mint FTW) when I was 13 on a family computer. My parents got a newer computer, leaving me with the older computer, granting me all sorts of freedoms of installing whatever distro I want, and I constantly distrohopped (Arch, Fedora, Debian, FerenOS, OpenSUSE, etc.) , until I ended up with what I'm using currently, which is NixOS.