Watched my niece yesterday and while we were playing Minecraft she noticed that my laptop “windows n stuff” didn’t look lik the schools computers and I told her about linux and she got rly interested and now she wants a laptop “just lik mine” which is runnin Linux Mint
She’s somewhat technical apt, for a 10 year old, and I could probs dig up a decent laptop for her but not sure if I should jus dump mint on a laptop for her and let her have at it or something else?
My niece, same age. no problems so far
I installed linux mint xfce on an old laptop for her.
we set it up together and she loves it. Themes icons and all that jazz.
I have hidden and removed items from the start menu. Just to keep it simple.
I also set up some aliases so she just has to open a terminal and type “update”. she loves that. Thinks she’s a hacker now and impresses her friends.
I have set up an alias to call bleachbit, so she just types “cleanup” in the terminal, types her password, and she can watch bleachbit do its thing. I explained to her how important it is to keep her machine clean, like housework at home.
I must say, Kids are a nighmare for attracting viruses and malware using windows, its not the best age to suddenly be thrust into the slop of the internet.
They are young and excitable and will click on anything and everything that catches their attention without giving it a second thought.
Its a big plus not worrying about viruses and malware on linux.
To stop her having free reign and accidentally seeing porn on the internet and protect her from the worst crap, I installed Mullvads DNS on linux and in the librewolf browser.
Mullvad have a fabulous family dns filter; https://family.dns.mullvad.net/dns-query
here are the options:
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
I have set the search engine to Startpage
I have also taken advantage of Ublock origin and added loads of these is the: my filters list
just a few of many to stop access to certain websites from the search pane
This one stops amazon links appearing in the startpage search
startpage.##.g:has(a[href=“.amazon.”])
startpage.##a[href=“.amazon.”]:upward(1)
This one stops ebay links appearing in the startpage search
startpage.##.g:has(a[href=“ebay.”])
startpage.##a[href=“.ebay.”]:upward(1)
I spent more time on this than anthing else;
While mint is neat, Ubuntu or any distro with gnome would work in the “very graphical, large icons” sense.
I dont know about mint, but debian does security updates automatically and just politely asks for a reboot now and then, perfect for an “unattended” device.
I dont know about mint, but debian does security updates automatically and just politely asks for a reboot now and then, perfect for an “unattended” device.
Yeah, Mint can do this too. I’ve set it up on a few of our computers, but it was a while ago so I can’t remember exactly how. It was very easy though. The only downside was Firefox insisting on a restart after an update, but apparently that’s been fixed now :)
I’m thinking Hannah Montana Linux
Ha ha, sadly I think Hannah is unknown to the kids these days 😔
I installed and switched to Ubuntu around the same age. I’m sure your niece will be fine with Mint. All she really needs to know how to do is to look stuff up online.
I recommend pointing her towards Mint and encouraging her to install it herself. Don’t assume that children are incapable of these things just because they’re children.
Maybe setup system backups with picka backup or sth like that so that if something brakes you can easily restore everything.
Here’s what I’d give to 10y/o me.
- Explain partitions and filesystems (I already knew CPU, HDD, RAM etc)
- Explain the boot startup process
- and how limited the motherboard’s mechanisms and the pre-OS environment is
- Hand over:
- 1 working computer with an empty internal HDD (no OS pre-installed)
- 1 USB drive with Debian ISO
- 1 USB drive with Arch ISO
- 1 other internet connected device with a pre-installed web browser
Don’t do this to others.
Don’t do this to others.
ROFL 🤣
