Linux for Kids?
Linux for Kids?
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.
Fedora apparently has some functionality.
There is also an arch wiki page on the subject.
Linux systems are used all over for enterprise use cases, which means there is a robust user permission system. Usage won't be Googleable with stuff like "parental control" but more likely keywords like "user restriction".
Not sure if you mention your wife because she knows Linux and thinks it's a bad idea, or because doesn't know Linux, and still thinks it's a bad idea.
Of course, when your kid one day learns to flash an iso onto a usb, and install an OS, any and all parental control will be symbolic. Hopefully you've successfully taught your kid how to use tech safely by then.
You'll want to look into browser extensions and blocking websites on your router, as well.
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.
Oh I looked into it recently and discovered endless os, it has from scratch parental controls, an offline encyclopedia/Wikipedia lite an other educative softwares and games. You can use it totally offline as it seems to be made for educative purpose. Check it it could be interesting for your purpose. (You can also download and install more stuff for it of course)
It's freeware of course. Their installer took ages to download, there are torrents of their full version (12Gb)
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.
Gnome itself is embedded with parental control and you can enable it while adding a new user
I don't know how other DEs deal with it, but I think all of them has something similar, tho
Edit: also may be a good idea set a AdGuard to set a DNS block for some origins... AdGuard gives you the capability to block several apps and you can customize blocks as well
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.
I got my daughter a surface book with Archlinux on it when she turned four. She'd previously been using an ipad so I wanted something that had a touchscreen, and I installed KDE as the desktop. She learned how to use it extremely quickly, and has even started in on the commandline now that she's 5 and knows how to read. GCompris is great too.
Me and my wife haven't bothered with parental controls and instead just keep an eye on her usage, but I agree with other commenters that controlling things at the router level seems like a better bet.
Give em linux mint, and set parental controls on the router, alternatively you can have an admin account which has a list of blacklisted ips, but i don't really recommend that since you'll never have a list that has everything, and if your kid wants to look at porn or whatever, they'll find a website that isn't blocked, also doing this probably means you won't be able to put your kid in wheel group which imo means they won't be able to learn as much
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.
Don't put parental controls on it. What do you want to control? Maybe put controls on the website that they can visit, but that goes on the DNS or router. Most kids will go to a mate's house that doesn't have any or as harsh parental controls anyway if they are particularly keen on seeing something that they 'shouldn't'. Parental controls are a fix for parents who can't talk to their kids; they make the parents feel safer but just send the issues underground. Gen X will have been writing code for a while at your child's age. I was. There was no choice if you needed to unlock a game you could've afford. At that time GUIs were a bad overlay over MS-DOS or DR-DOS. You had to know what you were doing to get the best out of it. Your kid will be fine with any distribution of Linux. If your kid is technically inquisitive likely to be good at maths/science, get them installing Arch. If not and they just want to use a browser, install one of the top five popular distributions from distrowatch.com. The Office suite for Linux is called LibreOffice. If you use Chrome as your browser you'll easily tell if your child has been on bad sites because your timeline will be filled with adverts for unsavoury impotence remedies. Enjoy.
PS printers are still bastards in Linux. Happily they're less bastardish in Linux (and Mac, because Linux and iOS use the same printing software) than Windows. If you like your life buy a decent Laser from anyone but HP - my generation bought the last decent HP printers they made.
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.
Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue as base. They are so stable, very nice to know they will not break. You may want universal blue.
GNOME has some form of parental control too but no idea. I would trust it way more than ElementaryOS, as it is one of the 2 main Linux Desktops.
GNOME is also stupid simple to use.
It may break KDE apps themes, and KDE has tons of nice learning apps. But this also goes for all other desktops I think?
Education:
Educational Games:
Random harmless games
- Gameeky
- surge the rabbit or mari0
- Sidetrack
- Billiards
- SuperTuxKart, 0AD, and all the other classics
Easy tools for learning stuff
- Krita, Inkscape, GIMP
- Footage (very easy and minimalist), Pitivi, OpenShot or other video editors, depending on the difficulty (KDENlive, Flowblade and some more may be the best)
- Tenacity/Audacity for audio editing
- ...
My six year old daughter's laptop died recently and I replaced it with a small micro PC. I burned isos of 7 or 8 mainstream distro live images on to USB sticks, then let her spend 2 or 3 hours on each of them over a few days, and let her pick her favorite. I even let her use the pre installed Win 11 OS to compare. Fortunately she hated it. She ended up picking KDE Neon, but also liked Pop!OS and Mint Xfce. I think getting to explore around and make her own decisions in the process helped bond her with the computer and the OS in a deeper way than if I had just stuffed something on there.
Don't overthink this, it's a kid. She/He would not be yet biased like you or your surroundings. About wife - I don't she would be against teaching kid how a computer works, maybe you explained it so she heard "hey can our kid spend more time in front of a screen and with my geeky thing" :D.
I have a little smart sister (now 9 yo) that use Linux, it started with her making a mess on Windows login (parents laptop) so I asked if she wants "her own space", but instead of new account I installed whole Fedora on second partition. Why Fedora? Because It works and looks nice, there really is no need for "educational", just install education programs on top.
There are basic parental controls in vanilla Fedora, but honestly there turned out to not be needed, she don't hook too much after first shock of tech and like two cries she learned to stop when we say to stop, at least most of the time. Depends on the child, I suppose some really need a timer, that's up go you, nothing bad with that. I have showed her some games too, she loves everything Tux. I teach her how computer works this way, showing more and more programs with time and every new icon of Krita, GCompris, Goxel or Scratch is new great thing. She has Windows at school, but everything works on her space too. Well almost, LibreOffice does not has 'online cliparts', so instead of arguing with 9 year old I told that program at she uses at school is not available on this OS (after a while of teaching she knows OS is something something wow the desktop looks like :D) and showed how to download search copy from the browser. With being honest and just responding on every little childlish curiosity question she already knows more about computers than her mother. I just made it normal for her, as after using Linux for years it is normal for me.I'd probably give them Linux Mint.
Basically any mainstream Linux distro is easy enough for a child, today.
For kids who can read tell them to press that 'Windows' key, and start typing what they're looking for.
For younger kids, place appropriate icons on their desktop.
I do my parental controls at the network level (PiHole, etc), so I haven't looked much into parental controls on the Linux host, itself.
I have started to favor PopOS, because it is familiar, because it looks a lot like SteamOs, what their SteamDeck runs, when they reboot into desktop mode, in order to mod their Minecraft.
My dad got me a Linux laptop as a kid (I was 10 I think?), and I am so grateful that he did.
To be fair, I already had a huge passion for computing, and it meant that I would constantly toy around with Linux, breaking things and learning how to fix them.
I have been a Linux user ever since, and I feel have learnt so much about computing because of it.
(I started on Ubuntu 12.04, with the glorious Unity desktop)
Arch linux? :) joke aside perhaps something with btrfs support is handy. you can easily rollback if something breaks. For parental control don't give the kid sudo/root. other then that restricting websites and stuff is more easily done on a firewall outside of the kid its control.
Almost any of the larger distros will suffice i think. Personally a fan of opensuse tumbleweed which has btrfs support out of the box. use a DE like kde/gnome and i think you have a very solid start
What does your wife have against linux? All the porn pop up viruses are on windows, and getting your kid on apple is setting them up to be in credit card debt for the rest of their lives.
Even my senile ass grandparents use Linux and they don't complain about every little thing like they did with windows. My dad wanted a Mac but free so after hackintosh being too much learning curve for him I used some random Mac inspired configs from the internet for one of the Linux DEs that I've never personally used, also no more babysitting and virus induced full wipes.
Parental controls I would do at the router level because eventually kids will surpass you in computer skills. Or maybe they won't because of seo and ai articles taking over the web.
DebianJr is the easiest pre-packaged distro for kids 7-12.
Under 12, I would keep it fully offline(remove NIC or blacklist MAC address.
Install a local wikipedia instance (or simple-wikipedia) for reference, and give them thumb drives/DVDs for media.
For the fully libre start to life, install Trisquel GNU/Linux and use the DebJr package list to install required software.
When I was a kid I remember being confused at what the installation questions were.
If I were my own parent, I’d explain how the OS can sort itself (FHS, Windows, macOS). This gives confidence for installing and inspecting software.
Next, I’d explain how drives work and how they’re represented in different systems. That means partitions and formatting too.
That would then take me to explaining what’s involved in OS installs, erasing everything, dual booting, retaining personal files, etc.
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.You probably want EndlessOS
When i was 9 my sister gave me a laptop she put ubuntu on and it pretty much worked for me. I have a pretty good sense for computers and maths so that probably helped. And on another note, no i didnt get trauma from unrestricted access to the internet because i never searched for stuff like that. The first time I started seeing(and thus avoiding) gore/shock videos was when my classmates also got devices. I think if you teach your kid well they will learn to avoid these things but be carefull because other parents(especially today) dont teach their kids about safety. Your milage may vary, im not a parent.
Kubuntu + adguard DNS and you're done. Good looking desktop which is fun to configure for a kid. Dolphin file manager can show the terminal in a tab, which is good to learn. Nothing compares.
My wife is not a fan of the idea, however .
Divorce!
Jokes aside, Edubuntu should cover you parental controls and Education tools needs. And since it comes with Gnome by default the UI should comfortable to your children. I suggest diving into it if you need more something sprecific. Good luck!
PS: There are some good articles flying around about how to convert your loved ones to linux. I have one measly convert and my advice is to show them how can linux solve their problems.
I would highly highly highly recommend a atomic distro. It's going to be a much nicer sandbox for someone starting out, regardless of age.
I was installing Linux myself on extra computers we had at 13-14. Adding to the people saying just give them something like Mint or Ubuntu.
Give them a real desktop, like Fedora. If they enjoy computers, they’ll love it and they’ll be excited to learn how to use it.