
Ask HN: Best way to set up linux for kids? - aidos
I&#x27;ve converted a low powered chromebook to linux (xfce) to give to my kids (6 &amp; 3) and I&#x27;m struggling to make it approachable &#x2F; inspiring for them to get started with.<p>Discussing it last night, I was saying that it was quite easy to get into when I was younger (1985!). There were physical disks that you had to choose from and put into the machine. Then there was a reset switch if anything went wrong. I guess I&#x27;m of that era, but it seems like it was very explorable.<p>I was wondering if anyone had recommendations of things to install to give them something to play with. My eldest loves art, so something along those lines would be good. Is there a drawing styles that would work well with linux?<p>Any thoughts appreciated!
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exikyut
Mentioning reset switches made me think of using a livecd approach, where you
decompress to RAM and everything is nuked on reset. This is very likely going
to be worth the effort to set up: if the kids get stuck, they can press a
magic button to fix it on their own. This will encourage them to be more
adventurous.

(Obviously you need to mount somewhere volatile to actually save things to,
unless you want to use NFS or something. Then there's the problem of every
program losing settings because it's impossible to filter the dotfiles and
.config in the home dir for "this will cause problems" on shutdown, and only
keep the bug-free stuff... not sure how to fix that.)

I know there's a painting program for Linux oriented towards kids, but I can't
remember it right now. If noone else mentions it I'll go find it.

But... given the master-reset capability, would it be overly insane to put
Inkscape and the GIMP on the machine? No, neither program has a naively
discoverable UI, so there _will_ be a learning curve, discouragement and
friction, but learning that there are horrible UIs out there early could be
interesting...

Another thought is that if you're from the 80s/90s, dump a bunch of emulators
on the thing. MAME and DOSBox will probably run _interestingly_ on a low-
powered ARM processor, but it may turn out that performance is acceptable.
That'll give you a position of confidence to work with, which will likely help
a lot.

Finally, I recommend installing both Scratch and Jupyter. Scratch is aimed at
kids; I find it utterly confusing myself, but then I started with QBasic and
no manual, not block-based programming, so that's probably why. Jupyter is
Python on steroids; the visualness and immediacy of it is likely to be _very_
helpful. (The QConsole version is likely to be faster than HTML notebooks.)

~~~
aidos
Thanks for all the advice. You're maybe thinking of Tux Paint? I've seen it
mentioned a few times but haven't tried it yet. Haven't used GIMP myself but
when I've tried I found it a bit hard to get started with.

Could probably set up a live cd on an SDCard, maybe have another partition for
storing their "stuff". Will look into that approach.

We actually tried to run an amstrad emulator on a first edition RPi the other
day and it worked ok-ish.

I played with Scratch and it seemed like it would work well. Will definitely
be installing that. I use ipython all day so Jupyter is definitely on my list.

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brudgers
Though I find the _idea_ of Linux attractive, it is not attractive to most
adults...and the _idea_ of Linux was not attractive to me until I was nearing
fifty. My opinion is that other than the rare outlier, the _idea_ of Linux
will not be attractive to a six year old or three year old.

[random internet advice]

For a child that loves art, I'd recommend a physical sketchbook and some
brightly colored markers. Computers are an art medium. Some artists find it
attractive. Other's don't do to the lack of mechanical fluidity.

The fact Linux is attractive to you does not equate Linux a fact of Linux
being attractive to your child. Your child will be more attracted to spending
time with you and if that happens while sitting at a computer, it will still
be about spending time.

Good luck.

------
aq3cn
Get the whole Raspberry Pi kit for them. It has Rasberian OS whixh comes with
softwares like Minecraft and SoniC Pi. You can also get the Raspberian OS for
your chrome book, all the necessasry software are preinstalled.

