I’m thinking about building a desktop with one of my kids and I would really prefer to put Linux on it. My wife is not a fan of the idea, however.
I’m wondering are there any good Linux distros/utilities for children that include parental control features and things like that? And that are easy to use for a child who has only used basic Chromebooks in the past?
If your kids are motivated enough, they will find a way around it.
Reminds me of my local public library in 1997. They had these public computers for people that didn't yet have Internet access, and the browsers were locked down and stripped with just "back", "forward", "refresh" buttons and a URL address bar.
However, there was a tiny question mark icon in the corner that when clicked, brought up the Windows help system (that browser thing that can navigate help topics). There was a link in there to open IE and go to a support page, and when clicked would launch the full Internet Explorer with a complete menu over top of the kiosk interface, and this browser instance was not restricted in what it could access like the kiosk browser was (I believe it may have been a custom version of Mosaic).
Who said I'd never talk to them about it? I'd just like to do it in a controlled manner at an appropriate age and prepare them without them seeing the most depraved shit right off the bat. Is that unreasonable?
I know your intentions are good but if my kid stumbled across gore or animal abuse they’re going to require a level of “talking to” that is waaay beyond my skill level, and a content blocker is a lot cheaper than a child psychologist.
I use a combo of Pihole + OpenDNS with filters. And my kid's user account does not have privileges to change network settings. Yet. Things will be enabled one by one in due time until he's in 100% control of his own computer.
And if he actually knows what a DNS server is and is digging around for the setting, and trying to hack my shit, then I'd say he's ready for the "adult" computing world.
My six year old daughter’s laptop died recently and I replaced it with a small micro PC. I burned isos of 7 or 8 mainstream distro live images on to USB sticks, then let her spend 2 or 3 hours on each of them over a few days, and let her pick her favorite. I even let her use the pre installed Win 11 OS to compare. Fortunately she hated it. She ended up picking KDE Neon, but also liked Pop!OS and Mint Xfce. I think getting to explore around and make her own decisions in the process helped bond her with the computer and the OS in a deeper way than if I had just stuffed something on there.
Don’t overthink this, it’s a kid. She/He would not be yet biased like you or your surroundings. About wife - I don’t she would be against teaching kid how a computer works, maybe you explained it so she heard “hey can our kid spend more time in front of a screen and with my geeky thing” :D.
I have a little smart sister (now 9 yo) that use Linux, it started with her making a mess on Windows login (parents laptop) so I asked if she wants “her own space”, but instead of new account I installed whole Fedora on second partition. Why Fedora? Because It works and looks nice, there really is no need for “educational”, just install education programs on top.
There are basic parental controls in vanilla Fedora, but honestly there turned out to not be needed, she don’t hook too much after first shock of tech and like two cries she learned to stop when we say to stop, at least most of the time. Depends on the child, I suppose some really need a timer, that’s up go you, nothing bad with that. I have showed her some games too, she loves everything Tux. I teach her how computer works this way, showing more and more programs with time and every new icon of Krita, GCompris, Goxel or Scratch is new great thing. She has Windows at school, but everything works on her space too. Well almost, LibreOffice does not has ‘online cliparts’, so instead of arguing with 9 year old I told that program at she uses at school is not available on this OS (after a while of teaching she knows OS is something something wow the desktop looks like :D) and showed how to download search copy from the browser. With being honest and just responding on every little childlish curiosity question she already knows more about computers than her mother. I just made it normal for her, as after using Linux for years it is normal for me.
If he chooses to install an atomic distribution, for example, he might have a simpler time ensuring that he can help undo any curiosity damage his kids may have wrought.
If the child is really young, check out the sugar desktop environment. There is an official distro from sugarlabs and there is also a fedora spin (fedora soas)
If the computer should be a little more functional, the GNOME desktop or the Deepin desktop are good options imo
What does your wife have against linux? All the porn pop up viruses are on windows, and getting your kid on apple is setting them up to be in credit card debt for the rest of their lives.
Even my senile ass grandparents use Linux and they don’t complain about every little thing like they did with windows. My dad wanted a Mac but free so after hackintosh being too much learning curve for him I used some random Mac inspired configs from the internet for one of the Linux DEs that I’ve never personally used, also no more babysitting and virus induced full wipes.
Parental controls I would do at the router level because eventually kids will surpass you in computer skills. Or maybe they won’t because of seo and ai articles taking over the web.
Arch linux? :) joke aside perhaps something with btrfs support is handy. you can easily rollback if something breaks. For parental control don’t give the kid sudo/root. other then that restricting websites and stuff is more easily done on a firewall outside of the kid its control.
Almost any of the larger distros will suffice i think. Personally a fan of opensuse tumbleweed which has btrfs support out of the box. use a DE like kde/gnome and i think you have a very solid start
My dad got me a Linux laptop as a kid (I was 10 I think?), and I am so grateful that he did.
To be fair, I already had a huge passion for computing, and it meant that I would constantly toy around with Linux, breaking things and learning how to fix them.
I have been a Linux user ever since, and I feel have learnt so much about computing because of it.
(I started on Ubuntu 12.04, with the glorious Unity desktop)
Basically any mainstream Linux distro is easy enough for a child, today.
For kids who can read tell them to press that ‘Windows’ key, and start typing what they’re looking for.
For younger kids, place appropriate icons on their desktop.
I do my parental controls at the network level (PiHole, etc), so I haven’t looked much into parental controls on the Linux host, itself.
I have started to favor PopOS, because it is familiar, because it looks a lot like SteamOs, what their SteamDeck runs, when they reboot into desktop mode, in order to mod their Minecraft.
Ummm, their SteamDeck runs Pop? Have you modded it? Because last I checked it ran SteamOS (an immutable Arch variant) and used KDE in desktop mode, whereas Pop uses Gnome…
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