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.
Fedora apparently has some functionality.
There is also an arch wiki page on the subject.
Linux systems are used all over for enterprise use cases, which means there is a robust user permission system. Usage won’t be Googleable with stuff like “parental control” but more likely keywords like “user restriction”.
Not sure if you mention your wife because she knows Linux and thinks it’s a bad idea, or because doesn’t know Linux, and still thinks it’s a bad idea.
Of course, when your kid one day learns to flash an iso onto a usb, and install an OS, any and all parental control will be symbolic. Hopefully you’ve successfully taught your kid how to use tech safely by then.
You’ll want to look into browser extensions and blocking websites on your router, as well.
I built my kids potato computers from the time they were 3-5, which was during covid. They need computer skills nowadays, and it put them at an advantage for covid school. We got them on java Minecraft which was huge for reading, typing, and some basic math skills (they figured out multiplication for crafting things like doors). I made a chart which had icons of things they want, with the word next to it, so they could search and type in creative.
We used Ubuntu Mate. It’s simple, stable, and familiar. They do NOT have sudo on these boxes. As we’ve advanced, they now have firefox (behind a pihole which upstreams to opendns’ family protect), gimp (with a wacom tablet!), inkscape, calculators, tenacity, libre office, and they’re starting to get into some cad to make things to 3d print. You have to come to terms with doing a LOT of patient hand holding, but it has paid off dividends.
Thanks for the advice. Yes I absolutely want her to have the opportunity to learn more technical stuff and be able to explore and play games. Also lan parties for games.
I just want some guard rails because we have issues with managing screentime and things like that.
My setup is a bit extreme, but here are my guardrails:
- All users have the same UID’s on every system. I’m 1000, wife is 1001, son is 1002, daughter is 1003. All these exist on all systems. Our primary group is “family” (gid 10000). Our files are all owned by user:family. This matters because we let them have access to the share of things like home movies and pictures, and I have a TrueNAS with an NFS mount that their user folders rsync to nightly for backup. If you wanna get crazy, you can put in a whole LDAP/freeIPA setup, but that’s a lot (and I did all that as a learning experience).
- They don’t have the account passwords. I have their password, and if they want to use it, the wife or I have to type the password. When we want them off, superkey+L to lock the computer, and if they reboot it comes to a login screen.
- If you really go this route, and go the whole LDAP thing, you can also tie that into apps like Jellyfin. I have a huge library of movies and shows, but there’s a folder called “KidMedia” and I literally manually symlink things to that folder if I want them to have access. I set up the phones/tablet with their own jellyfin accounts, and when they log in they only see their media. I also NFS mount that share, so for the same reason, they can watch stuff on VLC from the computer with access control. We also do that with nextcloud, so we can use nextcloud talk to chat internally. The tablets/phones have built in android controls, so the idea is once they’re on their device, they’re free within the ecosystem I set up and they don’t enter credentials other than device unlock.
In that case, I agree with the others and say leave this up to the router - not only is it far more easier to set up, it gives you/your kid the freedom to switch between distros/OSes, and you can even swap computers without worrying about having up the controls all over again.
A friend of mine was in the same situation as you (he’s also a Linux nerd), and he ended up with the router thing, and after extensive research, he decided to get a Synology router as it had all the features he was after (mainly limiting access times, monitoring and reporting). See: https://www.synology.com/en-global/srm/feature/device_content_control
And for extra filtering, you could also set the upstream DNS on the router to a filtering service such as Cloudflare for Families, AdGuard DNS Family etc.
My daughter had to take her laptop to school last week for her MAP tests (Nobara), and all the other kids with Macs, Chromebook or Windows were fascinated with her computer.
She came home pissed that they all wanted to try her computer and wouldn’t leave her alone 🤣🤣
I’m trying to pick a linux distro for a noob and they said they wanted a kde de like my arch + kde setup. I recommended them trying out kubuntu. I’m taking a look at nobara and idk, I just feel like there is more help for debian base distros out there.
Nobara is basically Fedora with all gaming tweaks already made for the user.
I know I don’t have to tell you how Arch is not noob friendly.
Having said that, there are plenty of Debian based distros with KDE out of the box. KDE Neon is Ubuntu based, for example.
But I hear it’s not stable enough and might not be noob friendly.
Fedora, in my opinion, is super stable. But that’s just me. My daughter has had 0 complains so far, I running it on an old HP Spectrum X360 with and Nvidia card). I’d be hard pressed to go back to anything Debian based (until the new CosmicDE is out, then I’m taking whatever new PopOS they choose to put it on for a spin).
Gnome itself is embedded with parental control and you can enable it while adding a new user
I don’t know how other DEs deal with it, but I think all of them has something similar, tho
Edit: also may be a good idea set a AdGuard to set a DNS block for some origins… AdGuard gives you the capability to block several apps and you can customize blocks as well
My kids, 9 and 11, use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Mainly because that’s what I use. They were with me when I set it up to choose a name for the computer, a username and a password (for their user and for the disc encryption).
I showed them how to configure wobbly windows (most important part) and how to use Discover to install games.
I installed Minecraft. I installed Steam (which has its own parental controls). I configured emails, Nextcloud and a password manager. I configured automatic updates.
I think that’s about it.
They’re responsible. They ask me for help if they need some. We educate them about people they meet online in Minecraft and other games. Works well so far.
We’re on the same boat. My kids only know Linux, and I just got my wife on Fedora about 5 days ago.
My 9 years old is on Zorin (his choice) 658-3330 on his PC, BUT and my 10 years old daughter is on PopOS on her PC and Nobara on her laptop (also her choice).
I have full control of the network with a PFSense full of VLANs, Adguard Home and some other goodies, and my wife and I have all the credentials to our kid’s accounts and devices.
Any distro they feel comfortable with will do, as long as you can manage it.
I got my daughter a surface book with Archlinux on it when she turned four. She’d previously been using an ipad so I wanted something that had a touchscreen, and I installed KDE as the desktop. She learned how to use it extremely quickly, and has even started in on the commandline now that she’s 5 and knows how to read. GCompris is great too.
Me and my wife haven’t bothered with parental controls and instead just keep an eye on her usage, but I agree with other commenters that controlling things at the router level seems like a better bet.
that’s the most r/linux thing ive ever heard
She uses Arch btw
Hah, I feel like they might not approve of a Microsoft laptop? I could be wrong though :)
I hate when my 4-year-old kid lectures me about the open source software movement
You should put your foot down and tell them it’s all about free software while they’re under your roof; they can push open source once they’re 18 and have their own place.
What do you think Hannah Montana Linux is for?
Give em linux mint, and set parental controls on the router, alternatively you can have an admin account which has a list of blacklisted ips, but i don’t really recommend that since you’ll never have a list that has everything, and if your kid wants to look at porn or whatever, they’ll find a website that isn’t blocked, also doing this probably means you won’t be able to put your kid in wheel group which imo means they won’t be able to learn as much
My kid, believe it or not, uses a NixOS laptop regularly. He doesn’t configure it yet, but honestly I’m not afraid of him having a go. When I was just about his age, I was figuring out DOS without the Internet to help, and while it was orders of a magnitude simpler, the documentation was orders of a magnitude more sparse too. Any of the big, well-documented distros (Ubuntu, Debian, NixOS (for some values of well-documented anyway), Fedora) would be fine. Honestly, I’d even let him loose with Arch at this point, or even Linux From Scratch.
I am hoping that shortly after mine can read & write, and I add a machine with NixOS for them to use, they will exceed my understanding of nix and start to teach me. 🤔
Given the “unlearn what you have learned” problems I’ve encountered on my own Nix journey, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened with shocking rapidity. Nix isn’t really THAT hard. It’s just (a) different and (b) obscurely documented.
True, it’s shockingly simple sometimes, and other times I feel like I need to be a rocket scientist. Emphasis on “feel” because in those instances, there is nothing to go by for documentation.
One thing I’d like to suggest is get most of their forward facing apps as Flatpak and let them install software that way instead of using the system package manager (even if it has a GUI). This jibes with others suggesting an immutable base system.
Obviously this may be more of a concern for older kids, but my kid started with Linux and it did fine… Right up until Discord started breaking because it was too old and they didn’t want to tangle with the terminal. Same thing when Minecraft started updating Java versions. Discord and Prismlauncher from Flatpak (along with Proton and Steam now) would have kept them happier with Linux.
As for internet, routers come with parental controls these days too, which have the added advantage of being able to cover phones (at least while not on mobile data). Setting the Internet to be unavailable for certain devices after a certain time on school nights may be a more straightforward route than DE tools.
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It does that everywhere, even on non .deb distros.
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Being open and transparent about what you’re blocking and why is key. I fully agree. If your kids trust you, it makes it super easy for you to keep them safe.
Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue as base. They are so stable, very nice to know they will not break. You may want universal blue.
GNOME has some form of parental control too but no idea. I would trust it way more than ElementaryOS, as it is one of the 2 main Linux Desktops.
GNOME is also stupid simple to use.
It may break KDE apps themes, and KDE has tons of nice learning apps. But this also goes for all other desktops I think?
Education:
Educational Games:
Random harmless games
- Gameeky
- surge the rabbit or mari0
- Sidetrack
- Billiards
- SuperTuxKart, 0AD, and all the other classics
Easy tools for learning stuff
- Krita, Inkscape, GIMP
- Footage (very easy and minimalist), Pitivi, OpenShot or other video editors, depending on the difficulty (KDENlive, Flowblade and some more may be the best)
- Tenacity/Audacity for audio editing
- …
Standard Ubuntu should have you covered.
One word of warning though, don’t be too egregious with the parental controls. If your kids are motivated enough, they will find a way around it.
Education really is your best weapon here. Tell them about the dangers of the modern web and computing.
If your kids are motivated enough, they will find a way around it.
Reminds me of my local public library in 1997. They had these public computers for people that didn’t yet have Internet access, and the browsers were locked down and stripped with just “back”, “forward”, “refresh” buttons and a URL address bar.
However, there was a tiny question mark icon in the corner that when clicked, brought up the Windows help system (that browser thing that can navigate help topics). There was a link in there to open IE and go to a support page, and when clicked would launch the full Internet Explorer with a complete menu over top of the kiosk interface, and this browser instance was not restricted in what it could access like the kiosk browser was (I believe it may have been a custom version of Mosaic).
Yep! Such container breakouts exist even today in Citrix !
Shit like this was what got me into cybersecurity
Parents shouldn’t teach kids to use snaps
Someone had to say it 🤣🤣
Could you block things at the network level?
Fun fact much of knowledge about active directory and security comes from misusing school resources. (More specifically bypassing restrictions)
lol. I am the exact same. Trying to work around stuff and bypassing just about anything thought me how most things work.
This probably holds true for most of us nerds.
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.
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.
Yes. And using restricting application access doesn’t really work with normal package managers, but is easy with flatpak.
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.
Let the break it, and like other things in life, make (teach) them fix it if they want to keep using it.
My six year old daughter’s laptop died recently and I replaced it with a small micro PC. I burned isos of 7 or 8 mainstream distro live images on to USB sticks, then let her spend 2 or 3 hours on each of them over a few days, and let her pick her favorite. I even let her use the pre installed Win 11 OS to compare. Fortunately she hated it. She ended up picking KDE Neon, but also liked Pop!OS and Mint Xfce. I think getting to explore around and make her own decisions in the process helped bond her with the computer and the OS in a deeper way than if I had just stuffed something on there.
