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.
My kids, 9 and 11, use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Mainly because that’s what I use. They were with me when I set it up to choose a name for the computer, a username and a password (for their user and for the disc encryption).
I showed them how to configure wobbly windows (most important part) and how to use Discover to install games.
I installed Minecraft. I installed Steam (which has its own parental controls). I configured emails, Nextcloud and a password manager. I configured automatic updates.
I think that’s about it.
They’re responsible. They ask me for help if they need some. We educate them about people they meet online in Minecraft and other games. Works well so far.
We’re on the same boat. My kids only know Linux, and I just got my wife on Fedora about 5 days ago.
My 9 years old is on Zorin (his choice) 658-3330 on his PC, BUT and my 10 years old daughter is on PopOS on her PC and Nobara on her laptop (also her choice).
I have full control of the network with a PFSense full of VLANs, Adguard Home and some other goodies, and my wife and I have all the credentials to our kid’s accounts and devices.
Any distro they feel comfortable with will do, as long as you can manage it.
I would give them full on Linux, just put parental controls on the router.
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.
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. 🤔
I built my kids potato computers from the time they were 3-5, which was during covid. They need computer skills nowadays, and it put them at an advantage for covid school. We got them on java Minecraft which was huge for reading, typing, and some basic math skills (they figured out multiplication for crafting things like doors). I made a chart which had icons of things they want, with the word next to it, so they could search and type in creative.
We used Ubuntu Mate. It’s simple, stable, and familiar. They do NOT have sudo on these boxes. As we’ve advanced, they now have firefox (behind a pihole which upstreams to opendns’ family protect), gimp (with a wacom tablet!), inkscape, calculators, tenacity, libre office, and they’re starting to get into some cad to make things to 3d print. You have to come to terms with doing a LOT of patient hand holding, but it has paid off dividends.
My daughter had to take her laptop to school last week for her MAP tests (Nobara), and all the other kids with Macs, Chromebook or Windows were fascinated with her computer.
She came home pissed that they all wanted to try her computer and wouldn’t leave her alone 🤣🤣
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I’d go raspberry pi for kids - gpio projects are fun and linking computer to physical world.
The newer ones are a bit pricey for what they are though.I abhor the idea of things made “for kids”. I learned to program when I was 10 on a Commodore 64. And we would wear an onion on our belt which was the style at the time… Sorry, where was I?
I’d just install a normal distro. Let the kiddo break shit and learn to fix it. Keep backups for recovery and probably isolate the system on your network for if/when kiddo does something stupid. Talk about security, being responsible, etc. We learn through mistakes not by playing in safe walled-gardens.
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I appreciate your input, I was also teaching myself to code by the time I was in middle school, but this is a different situation and some guard rails are needed to manage screen time and app usage, etc.
I’m not so much worried about her wrecking the computer and more about her wrecking her brain with unfettered access to the Internet
Does it need to be connected to the internet? At that age, I think you could get away with installing stuff locally that they could play with.
IMO you should create guard rails that you intend her to eventually understand and circumvent. Nothing is more empowering for a kid interested in tech than thinking they figured out how to get around the guard rails. Just make sure you can detect when it has happened.
Do something locally on the machine to block internet access. Maybe something as simple as turning off the network adapter. One day she’ll either learn enough about the system to remove the guard rails, or she’ll find other interests.
Personally, I’d use the router to limit access to locations and times. It’s more reliable, easier to do, and lets you be less picky with your distro.
Using a DNS level content blocker like Adblock DNS is a great option, IMHO, and is super easy to setup.
(For the record, parent of 8 and 11 yr olds)
Which isn’t a bad idea, but I’d still want some kind of parental controls like Android has to limit screen time. I don’t need Netflix.com to be all or nothing, but I certainly don’t want it to be four hours a day either.
Having your router limit internet connectivity time is effectively the same thing these days. There are some things they can do offline but not much anymore.
That’s exactly right. My kids’ VLAN goes down at 8pm every night, and they are aware of it. So much so that they usually just shut down at around 7:30pm and start asking for dinner.
Evidently, I audit their network usage regularly and if I find anything concerning, I sit down with them and my wife and talk about it (have found 1 instance in which my boy was looking for pirated games for Linux, and my daughter was looking for “pranks for school and how not to get caught” 🤣).
All in all, I think we nerds have an easier shot at parenting than most people.
Wouldn’t this be a usecase for a immutable distro? Cannot really break it? But haven’t used one myself yet so not sure how that holds up.
I bet that a kid with no root access or sudo permission couldn’t break any Linux system, immutable or not…
but then they won’t be able to install apps
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oh wow, didn’t know that
Standard Ubuntu should have you covered.
One word of warning though, don’t be too egregious with the parental controls. If your kids are motivated enough, they will find a way around it.
Education really is your best weapon here. Tell them about the dangers of the modern web and computing.
Parents shouldn’t teach kids to use snaps
Someone had to say it 🤣🤣
One thing I’d like to suggest is get most of their forward facing apps as Flatpak and let them install software that way instead of using the system package manager (even if it has a GUI). This jibes with others suggesting an immutable base system.
Obviously this may be more of a concern for older kids, but my kid started with Linux and it did fine… Right up until Discord started breaking because it was too old and they didn’t want to tangle with the terminal. Same thing when Minecraft started updating Java versions. Discord and Prismlauncher from Flatpak (along with Proton and Steam now) would have kept them happier with Linux.
As for internet, routers come with parental controls these days too, which have the added advantage of being able to cover phones (at least while not on mobile data). Setting the Internet to be unavailable for certain devices after a certain time on school nights may be a more straightforward route than DE tools.
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It does that everywhere, even on non .deb distros.
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Every distro is essentially the same it’s not the question you want to be asking
