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.
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.
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.
In that case, I agree with the others and say leave this up to the router - not only is it far more easier, 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 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 🤣🤣
I’m trying to pick a linux distro for a noob and they said they wanted a kde de like my arch + kde setup. I recommended them trying out kubuntu. I’m taking a look at nobara and idk, I just feel like there is more help for debian base distros out there.
Nobara is basically Fedora with all gaming tweaks already made for the user.
I know I don’t have to tell you how Arch is not noob friendly.
Having said that, there are plenty of Debian based distros with KDE out of the box. KDE Neon is Ubuntu based, for example.
But I hear it’s not stable enough and might not be noob friendly.
Fedora, in my opinion, is super stable. But that’s just me. My daughter has had 0 complains so far, I running it on an old HP Spectrum X360 with and Nvidia card). I’d be hard pressed to go back to anything Debian based (until the new CosmicDE is out, then I’m taking whatever new PopOS they choose to put it on for a spin).
Any normal distro. Kids learn fast. No one taught me how to use Windows 95, or XP. We figured it out.
Lol. I still remember my mom teaching me how to use a computer.
It was fun making Sonic as a desktop background :)
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.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.
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.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.
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.
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.
that’s the most r/linux thing ive ever heard
She uses Arch btw
Hah, I feel like they might not approve of a Microsoft laptop? I could be wrong though :)
I hate when my 4-year-old kid lectures me about the open source software movement
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.
Every distro is essentially the same it’s not the question you want to be asking
i partially agree here. Comparing something like Nix vs Gentoo is like comparing cars and plains. sure their both vehicles but that’s about the it.
Well, sort of.
If he chooses to install an atomic distribution, for example, he might have a simpler time ensuring that he can help undo any curiosity damage his kids may have wrought.
I’d probably give them Linux Mint.
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.
ElementaryOS comes with parental controls iirc
It does! You can limit screen time, filter websites, and block apps from running. I’m not sure how well they work because I’ve never used them though
That sounds like exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for. She’s not great at managing her electronic time yet and she needs some guardrails to make sure she’s not staying up all night watching YouTube videos and things like that.
But I also want to give her the opportunity to learn and explore
If you search for “Screen Time & Limits” on their site you can get a preview.
I’ve been running elementary as my daily driver for years with few issues, so I definitely recommend! Make sure to try out the safety settings on a live cd first though, I can’t verify how the limits work for sites and apps
They live up to their name!
If I may ask, why is your wife not a fan of the idea?
I think it was mostly the parental controls we aren’t familiar with on Linux and I think she thinks it would be too “hard” for her.
I don’t agree obviously
I see. Yeah there’s definitely a lot of options especially if you’re willing to block stuff at the network level.
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.
Ummm, their SteamDeck runs Pop? Have you modded it? Because last I checked it ran SteamOS (an immutable Arch variant) and used KDE in desktop mode, whereas Pop uses Gnome…
I’m wrong. Good catch.
