Ask HN: Best Linux distro for a young kid’s first computer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best Linux distro for a young kid’s first computer?

19 pointspseufaux29 comments

My 3 year old told me the other day that they want to be able to push buttons like daddy does at work. So now, ridiculous as it may be :D, I am working on repurposing an old desktop into their first computer. The idea is mostly just to teach them to use a mouse, keyboard, and maybe play some simple games.

At the moment, I am planning to install a lightweight Linux distro as the OS. Has anyone done anything similar? Any recommendations on a kid friendly distro? I am leaning towards using Elementary OS at the moment, but I’m not sure what else I’d put there.

Thanks internet friends!

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At that age the distro probably does not matter all that much. If whatever you choose doesn't work too well, you can install something else together. And cheer at the new selection of wallpapers during or after installation. But since mimicking dad's work is important, try to make it look & behave somewhat similar to your computer :)

(My sons used OpenBSD from ages two to four or five---I don't think they even realized that it was there, or what it was. They were more intent on playing gcompris, watching cartoons by way of a helper script I put on the desktop and experimenting with whatever piqued their interest at the moment.)

Thanks, good advice on making it look like mine. Sounds simple, but hadn’t even crossed my mind. I use macOS as my daily driver, so many distros have a similar look and feel.

I believe many distros achieve that feel using GNOME and the Dash to Dock extension

My daughter started on MX Linux at 5 and knows her way around pretty well... I chose it because I wanted something easy but lightweight, since we were repurposing an old Sandy Bridge laptop.

Now she is almost 8, we are building a new PC together and it will have a bit more horsepower, so we will likely be installing Linux Mint on it. I do think it's nice to have something user friendly. I personally am a huge fan of Linux Mint Mate edition and she sees me use it, so we likely will stick with the same on both our PC's.

> I personally am a huge fan of Linux Mint Mate edition and she sees me use it, so we likely will stick with the same on both our PC's.

goals

For a 3 year old, probably the research focus should be on distro's that are most compatible with enabling gaming. This is not something I have kept up with, but any distro that makes it easy to enable the proprietary video card drivers vs nouveau [1] and that makes it easy to install Steam would probably be the best route.

I am not certain which distro best fits that requirement. Perhaps the latest Fedora. [2] My only gripe with Fedora is their latest Beta has integrated a store into the desktop and like Microsoft Windows interacts with their servers throughout desktop navigation a.k.a. Telemetry. That said, it's a shiny polished product with decent documentation and many years of battle hardening.

[1] - https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/how-to-set-n...

[2] - https://getfedora.org/

As a lover of video games and an active game developer I have to ask… gaming for a 3 year old? Video games screwed up my brain as a kid in terms of learning delayed gratification / attention span control, and they didn’t start becoming common kids toys until I was like 8-10!

Give them books and building toys but for a desktop computer (def no tablets) stick with learning file systems and just writing/drawing programs, just my opinion but I’d lay off the games until they are older.

I notice a stark contrast in how my little ones behavior changes if I let them watch age appropriate TV or watch me play Switch games, even in small amounts… might seem extreme but I don’t want to set them up for a harder time through consumer oriented dopamine hacking so I’m taking what may seem like a radical approach. Especially after seeing the opposite approach consistently leading to parents putting their 7 year olds on Ritalin. Diet is hugely important as well… ok I’m done preaching hope it helps someone.

You bring up some good points but they did not ask me about the psychological impact nor am I an expert in this. If I were to offer my armchair commander opinion on that topic it would be to limit the amount of time the child is permitted on the system and to limit what multiplayer games are permitted to keep them away from abusive people and most importantly to be with them as much as possible and avoid the risk of the gaming platform becoming a baby-sitter. I trust in good faith that the person asking the question is a good parent and will spend as much time as possible with their child and maybe even join them in playing some of the games, as they are only a child once.

There are ways to automate some usage limits in Linux/Unix. One could use PAM limits to prevent logins to/from particular times of the day/night and to limit how long one may be logged in. These limits should be explained to the child so they are not as upset when the system logs them out. Perhaps find a way to put the system to sleep so that unsaved game progress is less likely to be lost.

Re: usage limits. I've been meaning to do this -- with a friendly notification daemon that says something like "Computer is going to turn off in 5/10/15 minutes. Try to finish what you're doing; you can continue tomorrow".

One could probably even call a program like mpg123 to play an mp3/wav that says this so they can hear it.

That’s a good thought about the video care drivers since the primary use will be games and art apps along with a bit of video. Fedora is what I use on my personal machine, so I personally love it and I know it well.

I used https://www.sugarlabs.org/ when my kid was quite young, it's worth sticking it on a USB and giving it a shot

Sugar looks interesting! It appears to hide much of the complexity which is good starting out I think. From your knowledge, is it pretty much a immutable system? Is there a way to add non-Sugar packages such as GCompris?

I love the idea. As someone who grew up and was encouraged with computers (and became a software engineer), I think it's a fantastic thing to do for your kid. Mint or maybe even plain Debian would probably be fine. Looking at sugarlabs.org that another user linked actually seems pretty great for this purpose.

Maybe eventually you can shift them over to a raspberry pi since they have a lot of children's educational hardware and software as well, but maybe for children a bit older than yours currently.

+1 for Mint, our 8yo son finds his way around nicely with it. I definitely had a "Maybe I'm actually a pretty cool dad" moment when I noticed him checking wifi availability on his own via 1) clicking the terminal icon and 2) typing "ping google.com" as if he had been doing this stuff for years.

Mint + Pico 8 or TIC-80 for explorative gaming has been a fairly good formula for us. I'm thinking of writing an oldschool text adventure on TIC-80 with him, so he'd 1) learn command line input and 2) develop language and grammar skills at the same time. Computers are not all that bad, yknow.

Prior to the current combo, I was thinking of some FreeDOS based system, because of its simplicity, and since cheesy Intel machines are available for nothing. I also considered this homebrew Z80 computer with BASIC -- for wich we, on all those romantic Father And Son Evenings, would build extra-primitive, ultra-distraction-free text adventures: https://rc2014.co.uk/

But, eventually, I realized that First-Graders These Days are already socializing online, so it is (unfortunately) fairly impossible to avoid something like Discord etc. For that, a machine with only DOS, some Forth or BASIC obviously won't do, but oh well. Now our son is playing a lot of Minecraft, including on servers, but his online behavior seems surprisingly mature or careful. Our household rule still states that he must not spend more than 1 hour on gaming every day, but, obviously, he is fairly creative in finding ways to "show Dad that Minecraft castle, but, uh, hey, I just noticed it needs 15 minutes of improvements, hold on".

Overall, I have found that our son seems to naturally prefer games with low-res graphics. He doesn't like ultra-realistic stuff. Really happy to notice this -- it's kind of like reading a book or drawing where the "realistic movie" is running only in your head. This is great for thinking, I guess.

Agreed. I wish someone had introduced me to computing at this age. I didn’t get a computer of any sort till I was in late elementary, early middle. Thanks for the thoughts!

Debian of course. See the story oft John Goerzen. https://changelog.complete.org/archives/1448-introducing-the...

Interesting article. It sounds a lot like my kid. I hadn’t really considered using a cli as primary. Not sure I’m sold on it completely, but I definitely will make a cli available as one of the “apps.”

Mint or Elementary make sense.

Another idea - if there aren't any real requirements from the system other than allowing your kid to poke around - try something like Haiku. It's not Linux but it's interesting and different and is still Unix-like.

I hadn’t heard of Haiku. It looks interesting, I’ll need to explore it. Thanks!

I setup Fedora Silverblue for my son a few years back for his first computer (he was 7). It worked well for his simple needs and was very low overhead in terms of management for the obvious reasons.

An immutable OS may be overkill but it was also a bit of an experiment for me to see how well it worked as a desktop given the restrictions and limitations at the time. It is a bit smoother now as progress is made with flatpaks etc

I would suggest Fedora with Gnome as it's a quite polished experience OOTB that shouldn't end up having lots of weird random issues that, for example, my Arch install has (although that's probably due to user error lol).

I started with Mint and Ubuntu when I was 9. I became familiar with installing programs via command line, but the Ubuntu software center really helped, so maybe just Ubuntu? The visual interface is pretty simple.

The most important thing is probably that the distro be rolling-release so she can update individual packages without doing a distro upgrade. I'd recommend Arch or Manjaro these days.

Gentoo and they should install it themself

My 4yr old finds Zorin Lite easy to use on an old laptop

Windows 11 (with WSL2).

Windows 11 with wsl2

sugar os

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