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.

  • @[email protected]English
    15•6 months ago

    My kid, believe it or not, uses a NixOS laptop regularly. He doesn’t configure it yet, but honestly I’m not afraid of him having a go. When I was just about his age, I was figuring out DOS without the Internet to help, and while it was orders of a magnitude simpler, the documentation was orders of a magnitude more sparse too. Any of the big, well-documented distros (Ubuntu, Debian, NixOS (for some values of well-documented anyway), Fedora) would be fine. Honestly, I’d even let him loose with Arch at this point, or even Linux From Scratch.

    • @[email protected]
      2•6 months ago

      I am hoping that shortly after mine can read & write, and I add a machine with NixOS for them to use, they will exceed my understanding of nix and start to teach me. 🤔

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

        Given the “unlearn what you have learned” problems I’ve encountered on my own Nix journey, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened with shocking rapidity. Nix isn’t really THAT hard. It’s just (a) different and (b) obscurely documented.

        • @[email protected]
          2•6 months ago

          True, it’s shockingly simple sometimes, and other times I feel like I need to be a rocket scientist. Emphasis on “feel” because in those instances, there is nothing to go by for documentation.