I’m thinking about building a desktop with one of my kids and I would really prefer to put Linux on it. My wife is not a fan of the idea, however.
I’m wondering are there any good Linux distros/utilities for children that include parental control features and things like that? And that are easy to use for a child who has only used basic Chromebooks in the past?
For reference the child is under 12.
Wouldn’t this be a usecase for a immutable distro? Cannot really break it? But haven’t used one myself yet so not sure how that holds up.
Let the break it, and like other things in life, make (teach) them fix it if they want to keep using it.
Yes. And using restricting application access doesn’t really work with normal package managers, but is easy with flatpak.
I bet that a kid with no root access or sudo permission couldn’t break any Linux system, immutable or not…
I can confirm. My little ones have been running Linux for years.
but then they won’t be able to install apps
Flatpaks can be installed without root access. It’s how the Steam Deck is usable despite the root filesystem being immutable by default.
oh wow, didn’t know that
If you dont have an admin account you cannot break the core system anyways.
I agree that rpm-ostree based distros are awesome here, but Linux Desktops are not made to be locked down.