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?

For reference the child is under 12.

    • @bigmclargehuge
      4•6 months ago

      This was my fathers approach when I was growing up. I was basically allowed to do whatever I wanted offline. But, outside of a small handful of websites (a couple gaming websites maybe), everything online needed his permission. This gave me a really solid understanding of how things worked, troubleshooting, etc, while also not letting me see anything too heinous.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•6 months ago

        Son, is that you? I had a linux machine setup for my kids with a reverse proxy. I let them have a handful of websites that were whitelisted and they could go directly to. Everything else was off limits unless I ok’ed it and added it to the list. It still boggles my mind at the scoffs I would receive from other parents, and even my spouse at the time.

        • @bigmclargehuge
          1•6 months ago

          Hehe well my dirty secret is that I was a Windows XP and MacOS X kid😅 I still have a real soft spot for those systems, especially XP. If I were ever to have kids though, I’d take this approach and introduce them to Linux young.