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Comment by lazydon | Hacker News Reader

My seven year old absolutely loves GCompris. I would recommend GCompris by far compared to what we have on the phone apps nowdays for kids.

I personally appreciate the old school non commercial spirit of the makers of the GCompris. It's one of the many goodies of sticking with Linux as my primary desktop OS.

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I'm planning to set up an old laptop with Linux for my 7 and 5 year olds, so I'm curious if you have any other software suggestions in addition to GCompris?

There's plenty! Try `childsplay`, `pysiogame` for collections of didactic activities. Other fun individual games are `raincat`, `colobot`. Try `rabbit escape` also. For fun (we let them play as prize) try `X-moto` and `SuperTuxkart` as well as `Supertux` platformer. We only let our kids play with libre games, so that we are able to adapt the games and learn how they are made, even reuse the assets. My kids are the same age 5 and 7.

Forgot to mention `pingus` is a lemmings-alike. Good for logic, also comes with a map editor which my kids like.

Tuxmath was great to practice mental math with my 5 and 8 year old.

Maybe Sugarizer? Looks like the easiest Linux install is going to be as a Chrome web app:

https://github.com/llaske/sugarizer/blob/master/README.md

The Sugar version of Turtle (can't remember the exact name), TuxPaint (which is also part of GCompris, but runs separately). Edubuntu has some other ideas.

Scratch of course, runs well in browser now.

Do you know of other softwares similar to gcompris?

- childsplay https://childsplay.en.uptodown.com/ubuntu (mentioned elsewhere)

- doudou linux http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/index.html (an entire linux distro that wraps gcompris and includes other child-specific apps/features)

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