Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?
198 points by evolve2k a day ago
198 points by evolve2k a day ago
As a tech parent I think one of the best things I did for both my son and daughter was for their first computer to help them to build and setup their own Linux computer (It was Ubuntu back then but they’ve both moved themselves to Arch these days).
We went together and bought a second hand desktop (exciting the people selling to us also) and when I got home I pulled out the Ram, HD and CD drive and set them aside; and then together with a screwdriver we “built the computer” over a few days.
In windows when a child goes searching the web for a “movie maker for windows” they are going to be in a world of hurt either finding expensive commercial options or super scammy sites promising the world.
By comparison on Linux if they search the local “app store” they’ll find stacks and stacks of free, useful, open licensed software.
My kids loved the power, freedom and later unexpected community this bought them.
Now my friend wants the same for their daughter who is 8 years old.
I’m planning to do the same and go with her parents and her and buy a second hand desktop together and then put Linux on it.
My question is where would you go from there? What suggestions do you have? What to install? Any mini “curriculums” or ideas?
Would love to hear your ideas and experiences. Linux with free and open software is the goal and focus.
My kids loved the power, freedom and later unexpected community this bought them. I think it is also important to realize/point out that we do a lot of projecting and our child may have very different interests. Not saying that applies to you evolve2k, just wanted to make the general point. I set up a Linux machine with our daughter and while it was initially ok, she did not have much interest in the power/freedom and it only became a nuisance for her. Her school/friends use PowerPoint - there is a lot of friction trying work with them in LibreOffice. She wanted to do DTP-like things several times and the Linux options are not exactly... user-friendly. Etc. In the end we got her a Mac Mini. She can still open a terminal, use Homebrew, etc. if she ever develops an interest. Heck, she can use most free software. However, she can also do the stuff she is currently interested in much more easily. E.g., she uses Swift Publisher, which is a very simple/user-friendly DTP program, can collaborate on PowerPoint presentations when needed, etc. First and foremost listen to what your child is interested in. this is the line of thinking which led me to furnish daughter with Windows laptops and, later, desktops; I remove the adware & spyware to some degree, but Windows (and I assume Mac, but I'm not in that space) has the benefit of generally being reasonably intuitive for basic use WITHOUT A CHEAT SHEET and, importantly, fast and easy to teach intermediate use of. if she wants to know how to enable literal (that is, correct) filename sorting in File Explorer or write an HID driver, I'll be here. + I sure don't feel like debugging every strange artifact appearing in Steam games as a result of emulation. one thing I have protested, to the point of being obnoxious, is school-managed Chromebooks. I've talked to every principal of every school she's been in since Covid-19 to persistently request I be allowed to furnish a Windows laptop or at least a Chromebook I manage. -and in a bit of a surprise to me, everyone's been accommodating (though never to let her use a Windows laptop; I think maybe providing it as an option makes breaking policy to let her bring a self-managed Chromebook seem reasonable). I argue I operate web services with user information at home and don't want school employees on my network, and I don't want the financial liability of her accidentally damaging school property. > she did not have much interest in the power/freedom The reason I started with Linux with my kids is so they were aware that that power and freedom exists. Kids that grow up in a mobile ecosystem (and increasingly both the Microsoft and Apple ecosystems) are fundamentally disempowered, just as the adults that use that ecosystem are. The goal of having my kids use Linux was to make them understand that they did have agency. Fifteen years on, I have to say it was an excellent decision. They're light years ahead of their peers in terms of their ability to use computers. When forced to use Linux at an early age, I was given the agency to be made fun of and miss out on social things, i.e. discussing currently relevant games. It got me the jobs and knowledge eventually too, but I really did not learn much from blindly running ./configure and make and make install. I shudder to think exactly how my wine installation worked. There are significant downsides to using Linux and the freedom it brings needs lots of context to appreciate. If you don’t provide the context, Linux is not empowering- it is just a windows that works less. > discussing currently relevant games We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. Fortnite and Battlefield are replaced with OpenMW and Veloran. If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point. The value is in understanding and leveraging that understanding to achieve your goals. In many ways, this isn't about Linux at all. It's about parenting. > We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. This is almost word for word the same way my parents talked about Harry Potter and Pokemon when I was feeling alienated in school for only being allowed to read religious books for entertainment. It leads to some pretty strong resentment, if that's the kind of thing you care about. My boys are sitting and reading through this with me as I make comments. They are very surprised by the resentment expressed by many of the comments. My eldest read your comment and said that Battlefield and Fortnite are trash because of the multiplayer component that leads to gameplay that's low quality. He doesn't feel this way about Elden Ring, for example. In short, we exercise judgment. It sounds like the difference may be— if your boys are able to make the comparison— that you also did not forbid them from those games? That would explain some of the difference from resentment in these areas that is often born from the material being banned. That leads to social isolation, because multiplayer w/ people you know is really not so much about the game mechanics compared to the shared social experience. Just to be clear, I don’t think your parenting decisions here are harmful, and I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for the centimeter thick gentoo manual. My only plea is to acknowledge the downsides- and it might well be the case they are minimal. I wish you luck and patience in parenting. What does that even mean? How can we trust your kid's judgement of games they're not allowed to play? When I was a kid I parroted my parents opinions about Harry Potter books being a pathway to practicing witchcraft. Now in hindsight I recognize those weren't so much my opinions as they were a performance to get my parents approval. To be clear I'm not psychoanalyzing your kids (not liking multiplayer is rational), I'm sharing my own related experience. That's an opinion... All multiplayer games are bad. I didn't want to paraphrase what he said too much, but since you're inquiring, I think the general idea is that multiplayer games strive for particular types of engagement and the techniques that companies use to drive that engagement is often negative. I can see that this also exists in single-player games, particularly in mobile apps. We tend to avoid those as well. Multiplayer is a special category of risk in my opinion because I was an ever quest player and I built a feeling of responsibility toward the players that were relying on me and this led me away from schoolwork. I'm trying to avoid that same pitfall by still allowing them to game, even in a multiplayer setting, just only to a limited degree. We simply try to avoid the games that are the most egregious in this particular way because they're the riskiest. After a ~20 year break from first person shooters I’ve recently played Call of Duty Multiplayer and what struck me was how many superficial skins or various rewards were visible to others - it seems to steer the player to accumulate these things (through play or $), to show others in the game. And the odd pumpkin heads (literally players with pumpkins as heads) running around coinciding with Halloween. Very different than Counter Strike circa 2005. Roughly the same mechanics but much more commercialised, playing to the psychological weaknesses of players. Limiting reading like that is extremely restrictive and unnecessary. I do not think it can be compared to choice of OS where you have to choose one per machine (unless you dual boot or run VMs). I am guessing when you say "religious books" you mean a narrow range of books approved of by a very narrow minded religious group. Not much mention of, say, scriptures and mystics using sexual imagery, for example. right? Of the many deeply religious major authors who did not fit that particular groups views? If you follow the context of the thread it should be clear my reply is about GP prohibiting their kids from playing games with their friends, not the OS choice. My kids play games with their friends, just to be clear. What we don't do is pick up any game that their friends happen to be playing without evaluating it first. And this is a discussion that I have with my children, not some mandate from on high. > If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point I digress. Everyone has to start somewhere and not everything has to have a point in the start When I started using linux, I got so fascinated by open source software that I would just search for software/software types and searched open source alternative to X and go to alternativeto or others and try it out etc. I used to copy paste dnf commands in the start and I still remember that phase. I think I learnt linux from myself and have given challenges along the way and I feel like there are things that I have still done blindly along the way (building linux isos) But the fact was that I still felt proud that I was atleast able to replicate the commands and able to have some familiarity with the process. I feel like if I wanted to able to know more about xorriso and cpio to a deeper degree to understand what wizard magic commands I was running to building custom linux iso s etc. Now I don't know about fortnite etc., I am a kid but surprisingly games don't interest me that much, I am way more in my movies / tv shows (just ended dexter s8) right now. There is some alienated feelings when people online my age mention the games they play but I think that games on linux are genuinely great support from what I know and my pc doesn't have anything beyond integrated gpu so yeah my cousins didn't want me to play much games and so they didn't buy a good gpu during the pc and I think they did succeed in this. Its complicated to how I feel the situation or even let alone think how I would even try to approach this situation if or when I become a parent myself. Honestly, parenting can be a bit hard but I still don't know if you should shun something that you think is faddish or low quality partially because I think that the best thing you could do (imo) is educate them on the positives on linux and how they might outweigh the benefits of fortnite in the short to long term in a fun manner. Its um complicated and there is definitely a feeling inside me on that i do some incredibly niche things which would be so complicated to explain to someone my age in my proximity. I think there is only one or two of my friends who actually know even 1% of the stuff that I do in linux (one of them had installed hyprland because of me haha) >We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. Fortnite and Battlefield are replaced with OpenMW and Veloran. My parents didn't let me read Song of Ice and Fire Harry Potter (and do a lot of other contemporary culture things) when I was younger because they said they are pop culture fad. Only haute culture literature in this household! I've had a good childhood but I also missed out on a lot of good things because parenting decisions like this. And Fortnite is actually an awesome game, it's the mugen we were all dreaming for. At the time it was a GTA title. Regardless, the Linux alternatives are useless, there is no alternative to the socially agreed upon phenomena, the child can either participate pr they cannot. The exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing, but you end up having the child swim upstream a bit. All games run on Linux in 2025 except multiplayer titles that want to install kernel level anti cheat. Does Fortnite? I remember finishing hl2 on dx level 7, and then trying the same with ep1 and ep2. Those games are a lot harder when half the physics objects are not rendered. Do not get me wrong - I run Linux on all of my personal machines today, I play games on them, I know what's the state of gaming on Linux. I also know that every now and then I will get to at the very least read some logs to figure out what's going wrong, e.g. the native port of Civ VI was looking for a version of openssl whose time had passed. Further, relying on Wine/Proton inherently means you will always lag behind the bleeding edge in terms of DX APIs, as wine/mesa people need to catch up to implement them. Even worse if it is not related to graphics,e.g. as the spatial audio APIs don't have an open source analogue that is ferociously trying to keep up with feature parity. And of course we also have kernel level anti-cheat. I have immense respect for everyone who is involved in making games (and windows software in general) work on Linux. But there will always be stumbling blocks when you are playing 2nd fiddle, and you've not been given the sheets. And nobody told you where the gig is happening. Fortnite will work with Heroic Games Launcher. Though I believe you may run a higher risk than normal of being banned by Epic for cheating. So try not to be too good. > Does Fortnite? That falls under the "multiplayer titles that want to install kernel level anti cheat" Just curious how did you persuade them? From what I see kids usually want to play whatever other kids play, like TikTok or Roblox or Fortnite. > If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point. The value is in understanding and leveraging that understanding to achieve your goals. I don’t know about that. Just to be upfront: I’m not advocating putting your kids through this because I think they have to have that motivation for themselves to really benefit. However, I basically did blindly follow guides to try and get things working without fully understanding what I was doing. Over time, things stick and I’m able to look under the surface and get a better understanding and better solve the problem I’m facing. Hell, any “Learn X Language” book works like this! There’s always boilerplate that you need to kinda skip over for a while just so you can get a running program. Hell, I’m leaning Rust and I’m using #[] “decorators” and I couldn’t tell you exactly what they’re doing! I’m sure you also give out raisins and sugar free mints at Halloween too. We don't get many kids coming to the house on Halloween. Only two this year. We buy this big bag of candy at Costco, and we always end up with a lot of extra, and my kids end up sitting and eating it. Not great. The point isn’t to play the best “non-faddish” games. It’s to play what’s in the zeitgeist and form bonds with people their own age. I’m so glad my parents didn’t override my decisions on literature or video games or TV shows. I watched anime then, my parents didn’t get it, and that’s perfectly fine. I continue to enjoy it now. If they had made me adopt their mindset of “anime = fad” or “anime = cartoon = childish” I’d have been worse off. Instead of enjoying masterpieces like Frieren I’d be snobbishly thinking about what a fad it is. We avoid fads because they come and go too quickly. My kids connect with their friends on games that are more enduring, like the From Software titles. Enduring based on what metrics? Fornite is now an 8-year old massively (and still is) successful game. And the Battlefield series is actually 7 years older than the Souls series if you count from Demon's Souls. Comparing these 3 games is even more absurd because they are from entirely different genres, and they are not mutually exclusive, one can enjoy more than one genre. I agree with other commenters in here, I feel sorry for your kids and thankful that my parents didn't treat me like what you are doing with your kids now. When I think about enduring titles, I think about whether the kind of game that you'd pick up 20 years later and still consider to be a good game. I raised them on a curriculum of games starting with 80s titles and as they got older I progressed them all the way up into the 2020s so they would have a perspective on where particular gameplay mechanics came from. I see your point about the longevity of the Battlefield series and Fortnite, but my impression is people don't go back and play earlier Battlefield titles: I have always viewed them a little bit like the FIFA titles where there is a constant treadmill of needing to buy the latest version of the game. This is not true for Dark Souls, for example -- it's a sort of game you could play in decades and it would be as much of a masterpiece then it is today. I didn't really mean to compare the titles, but rather to use them as examples of titles that I would approve or disapprove of. My kids choose the games they play, but I exercise judgment in vetoing certain decisions. My example of the From Software titles were not games that I bought for them, or even played (in the case of Elden Ring), but rather titles that my boys were into because of their friend group playing it. They've been playing Night Reign lately and enjoying it. I think people read into my dismissal of Battlefield and Fortnite as indicative of some much larger pattern that they've had a really bad experience with, but I'm not sure that conclusion is warranted. I was 100% on your side until you list FromSoftware games. As good as they are, they're a single-genre game developer that has a very narrow design and audience. There's nothing more substantive or enduring about their games intrinsically, that's 100% you just projecting your own opinions about what games are 'enduring' onto your kids, and is not giving them the 'guidance' you seem to think it is. Not really. I tend to favor single-player games because they can be effectively archived and played in several decades. Multiplayer games routinely just get killed by their publishers. So I do view single player games as intrinsically more enduring than their multiplayer counterparts. I'm sorry you see it as projection onto my children. I'm keenly aware that many parents try to force their kids to live the life they lived, and I've been careful to not do that. But I understand that that's not coming through to you in this discussion. I appreciate the advice though. > Multiplayer games routinely just get killed by their publishers. You are confusing "multiplayer" with "massively multiplayer online" games. The vast majority of multiplayer games are not MMOs. There are tons of multiplayer games that you can run your own servers for, or which use P2P or local LAN connections to not require any publisher presence or support for. Hell, set them up a Minecraft or ARK or whatever survival-crafter game server, and they can invite and play with their friends on it.
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