I REALLY want to get away from using all Microsoft products. My spouse and I use Linux but not for our kids just simply because I have yet to find anything that does what Microsoft Family does - being able to remotely set time limits, keep an eye on screen time stats, block websites and apps remotely, see what websites they’ve been using, etc.
So far I’ve found some disparate apps or methods that can do some of this. But our family situation is complicated, not least of which includes disability and special needs. So basically, yeah, I need to be able to spy on what my kids are doing on their computers but I don’t want Microsoft or any other companies being able to do that. I would like to be able to switch the kids laptops/PCs onto Linux as well, but again, the lack of remote parental controls or some sort of centralised access has been preventing that so far.
We don’t need a phone app, but would just really like some central place that we can do this from that respects privacy, isn’t trying to sell us yet more crap and is preferably FOSS.
monitoring can be done with the network. control can be managed there too, force them through a proxy and route all port 53 traffic to your DNS. don’t let anything out that does not go through your proxy and dns.