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

• phendrenad2 4y ago
  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.
• taneliv 4y ago
  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.)
  • pseufaux 4y ago
    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.
    • askiiart 4y ago
      I believe many distros achieve that feel using GNOME and the Dash to Dock extension
• rvz 4y ago
  Windows 11 (with WSL2).
• neilsimp1 4y ago
  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.
  • pseufaux 4y ago
    I hadn’t heard of Haiku. It looks interesting, I’ll need to explore it. Thanks!
• LinuxBender 4y ago
  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-nvidia-as-primary-gpu-on-optimus-based-laptops/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/how-to-set-n... [2] - https://getfedora.org/ https://getfedora.org/
  • pseufaux 4y ago
    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.
  • luxuryballs 4y ago
    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.
    • 4y ago
• tren 4y ago
  I used https://www.sugarlabs.org/ https://www.sugarlabs.org/ when my kid was quite young, it's worth sticking it on a USB and giving it a shot
  • pseufaux 4y ago
    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?
• blubberblase42 4y ago
  Gentoo and they should install it themself
• buboy 4y ago
  sugar os
• jjice 4y ago
  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.
  • pseufaux 4y ago
    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!
  • marttt 4y ago
    +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/ 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.
• owenpalmer 4y ago
  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.
• navjack27 4y ago
  Windows 11 with wsl2
• satysin 4y ago
  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
• hommelix 4y ago
  Debian of course. See the story oft John Goerzen. https://changelog.complete.org/archives/1448-introducing-the-command-line-at-3-years https://changelog.complete.org/archives/1448-introducing-the...
  • pseufaux 4y ago
    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.”
• morog 4y ago
  My 4yr old finds Zorin Lite easy to use on an old laptop
• audelair 4y ago
  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.
  • jnk345u8dfg9hjk 4y ago
    > 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
• DivineBicycle 4y ago
  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).