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.
The thing about that is that I’m convinced the computer itself should be completely normal, it’s just internet access that should be monitored (up until a certain age). Take a look at the creepy shit kids posting at r/teenagers have to deal with, or the abuse that goes down in seemingly safe Discord servers.
If I ever have kids and they want to see what happens when they delete /etc, I’ll encourage them (assuming I took care of backups). Let them mess around with Scratch or C or Javascript or whatever. The software on the computer is the safest part of interacting with a computer these days.
I agree on just installing some normal distro, but it shouldn’t be left completely unmonitored when it comes to websites. I wish the internet I experienced as a kid was still around, but it isn’t, and that sucks.
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.
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.
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.