My nephews & nieces aren’t currently allowed much computer access because their parents worry about screen time, inappropriate content and the like. But their mother was sharing concerns with me that they won’t have the basic computer skills and understanding that we learned growing up in the 80s and 90s. Having to make computers work before you got your reward of a game was such a big motivation for me as a child. We learned to program in BASIC on spectrums and Amstrads (typing code for a game out of a magazine didn’t require much knowledge but taught me a lot) and about memory management by fiddling around with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS to get DOS games running, and so on.
Are there any good educational computers / distros / OSes? Searching online mostly shows simplified GUI to access educational “games”. But I was wondering if there was a Raspberry PI or linux fork or something, that was geared to create a challenging but supportive environment for learning the fundamentals.
Any suggestions?
I did.
Some people prefer a more hands-on approach - like me.
Not that I’m averse to reading or anything, but I learn best by actually getting my hands dirty - especially if it involves computers. When I first learnt DOS, it was because I wanted to play games like Prince of Persia, Dangerous Dave and Alley Cat, so I watched my older cousin type various commands and observed the effects. When he wasn’t around, I’d sneakily boot up his PC and figured out that instead of typing
CD PRINCE, I could typeCD CAT, followed byCAT.EXEto play Alley Cat. A bit of trial and error over the years and I mastered the basics of DOS. It wasn’t until 5 or 6 years later and that I got my hands on “DOS for Dummies”, and filled in the gaps in my knowledge. Three decades later, I still haven’t managed to beat Dangerous Dave, but hey, at least I mastered DOS.With Linux, again, I learnt it by practice, mostly thanks to a free Red Hat 5.0 CD bundled with a computer magazine. Red Hat got me curious, but it was SuSE that blew me away with how polished and professional it was, compared to the clunky Win9x. Long story short, after decades of distro hopping, I finally settled down on Arch, but by that time I’d already figured out how most of the nuts and bolts fit, but the Arch wiki certainly helped fill in the gaps.
Like how necessity is the mother of invention, there needs to be a motivation factor for people to learn something new. In saying that, I wouldn’t know how you’d motivate say a Gen Z person to pick up appreciate the CLI, unless they were already technically inclined, have a curious nature and a passion for learning new things.