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.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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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.
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)
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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
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.
Could you block things at the network level?
Fun fact much of knowledge about active directory and security comes from misusing school resources. (More specifically bypassing restrictions)
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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.
I just installed Ubuntu for my 11 year old and they could use it fine. Didn't bother with any parental controls on the device itself (although I can ssh in if needed) because the network deals with filtering at a DNS level.
I would give them full on Linux, just put parental controls on the router.
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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.
Thanks for the advice. Yes I absolutely want her to have the opportunity to learn more technical stuff and be able to explore and play games. Also lan parties for games.
I just want some guard rails because we have issues with managing screentime and things like that.
In that case, I agree with the others and say leave this up to the router - not only is it far more easier to set up, it gives you/your kid the freedom to switch between distros/OSes, and you can even swap computers without worrying about having up the controls all over again.
A friend of mine was in the same situation as you (he's also a Linux nerd), and he ended up with the router thing, and after extensive research, he decided to get a Synology router as it had all the features he was after (mainly limiting access times, monitoring and reporting). See: https://www.synology.com/en-global/srm/feature/device_content_control
And for extra filtering, you could also set the upstream DNS on the router to a filtering service such as Cloudflare for Families, AdGuard DNS Family etc.
My setup is a bit extreme, but here are my guardrails:
- All users have the same UID's on every system. I'm 1000, wife is 1001, son is 1002, daughter is 1003. All these exist on all systems. Our primary group is "family" (gid 10000). Our files are all owned by user:family. This matters because we let them have access to the share of things like home movies and pictures, and I have a TrueNAS with an NFS mount that their user folders rsync to nightly for backup. If you wanna get crazy, you can put in a whole LDAP/freeIPA setup, but that's a lot (and I did all that as a learning experience).
- They don't have the account passwords. I have their password, and if they want to use it, the wife or I have to type the password. When we want them off, superkey+L to lock the computer, and if they reboot it comes to a login screen.
- If you really go this route, and go the whole LDAP thing, you can also tie that into apps like Jellyfin. I have a huge library of movies and shows, but there's a folder called "KidMedia" and I literally manually symlink things to that folder if I want them to have access. I set up the phones/tablet with their own jellyfin accounts, and when they log in they only see their media. I also NFS mount that share, so for the same reason, they can watch stuff on VLC from the computer with access control. We also do that with nextcloud, so we can use nextcloud talk to chat internally. The tablets/phones have built in android controls, so the idea is once they're on their device, they're free within the ecosystem I set up and they don't enter credentials other than device unlock.
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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.
dont use parental controls. Its fake, doesnt make sense, and limits learn oportunities. Any Linux works out. Linux Mint works great
Bypassing parental control is a great learning opportunity, tho :D
Probably have a porn and PC game filter to thank for my career in IT
dont use parental controls
That's how you get your kid to encounter MLP porn. Or worse, discover Gab and 4chan.
Custom DNS settings?
I use a combo of Pihole + OpenDNS with filters. And my kid's user account does not have privileges to change network settings. Yet. Things will be enabled one by one in due time until he's in 100% control of his own computer.
And if he actually knows what a DNS server is and is digging around for the setting, and trying to hack my shit, then I'd say he's ready for the "adult" computing world.
Thats when you show them the picture of 4chan meetups and ask them if they want to end up like that.
Early access in a controlled environment is a really good way to make sure people don't fall down rabbit holes.
Obviously it depends how old, but if you block a specific website it's only a matter of time before they work out a way around the block
And then you’d have to talk to them about it. Can you imagine the horror!
I know your intentions are good but if my kid stumbled across gore or animal abuse they're going to require a level of "talking to" that is waaay beyond my skill level, and a content blocker is a lot cheaper than a child psychologist.
Who said I'd never talk to them about it? I'd just like to do it in a controlled manner at an appropriate age and prepare them without them seeing the most depraved shit right off the bat. Is that unreasonable?
Don't assume the intentions of other people.