Best Linux distro for a young kid’s first computer?
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!
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.)
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.
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/
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.
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 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