A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That’s what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.
I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same “drive mappings” to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.
I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I’ve written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their … issues but both work pretty well.
Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.
My older brother got me into Ubuntu when I was around 12. He basically showed me the basics, like the terminal and a couple commands, then just told me to manpage or Google everything else.
Then I got Linux for the Wii and that really got me into the nitty gritties of Linux.
My kids have always been using Linux because that’s what I use on my gaming PC. When it was time for my eldest to get his own computer I tried to educate him on the differences between Linux and Windows (admittedly with my bias) and he chose Linux. I feel like wobbly windows played a big part in that.
He moans about some unsupported multiplayer games now and then and I have told him that we have a spare SSD he may use to install Windows. But so far his suffering wasn’t big enough to help me step him through that process.
Give a kid the arch install wiki and a computer with the USB iso ready to go. Tell them they aren’t allowed food until they install it and run neofetch.
As a kid I had windows 98 (and later xp) dual booted with debian and at some point some version of suse. This was ~20 years ago
Well I used it just fine and I knew a bout the mysterious “root” and “sudo” that my dad would use but I was just playing some games and maybe using the web browser.
Using the GUI I never learned Linux and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started using Linux again, and it was only because I wouldn’t be able to continue using Windows 7 anymore.
So I don’t have any experience with teaching Linux and especially not to kids, but I think kids are actually really good at learning stuff if they need too, so give them a PC and the tools to figure things out, if they want to use it they’ve got to learn, and don’t give them other options where they don’t have to learn anything.
With my kid, he just gets on Steam and starts doing his thing with his friends like everybody else as if he was on Windows. It makes no difference to him. I figure I'd let him learn the same way I learned computers, by just standing back and letting him poke and prod around and giving assistance and guidance when necessary. He can't break anything important.
I tried this with my son, who is now 17 and not nearly as computer literate as I was by his age, let alone Linux literate at all. I think it’s a generational thing, as a kid growing up in the 90s I HAD to learn how to administer our PC at a higher level to do the things I wanted to do. Now with easy apps and tablets and auto-installation of all-the-things you just don’t need to be an advanced user to do what you want to do. This is just my experience, YEMV
It’s obviously not representative of the overall Linux experience but I recently realised that messing around on the Linux bits in ChromeOS would be a pretty good way to learn Terminal things, at least for Debian. It’s sandboxed so it doesn’t matter if you screw up and if you do it’s like two or three clicks to start afresh, way simpler than setting up and resetting a standard VM for the inexperienced. It, of course, means using a ChromeOS device but maybe that can be a secondary lesson on having megacorps profit from your data.
My kids only know Linux and have never seen Windows in their life before. They know their way around KDE just fine and get the stuff done they need. For gaming, it is steam with proton but mostly they game on consoles.
My sons are in that age bracket and when they requested a laptops for themselves (older sister got one for school stuff) I “borrowed” decommissioned thinkpads from work, threw empty ssd’s on them and gave computers to boys with linux mint installer on usb-stick. Younger one got it running in couple of hours without any help and is actively learning on how to use the thing, yesterday he told me how he had learned to open software using keyboard shortcuts and in general is interested about the tinkering aspect of things. Older one has a bit more pragmatic approach, he got the installation done as well but he’s not interested about the computer itself as it’s just a tool to listen to a music, look up for tutorials for his other interests and things like that.
Both cases are of course equally valid and I’m just happy that they are willing to learn things beyond just pushing the buttons. But I’m also (secretly) happy that my youngest shares my interests and he’s been doing simple games with scratch and in general shows interest on how the computers, networking and other stuff actually works.
I think I read his blog back then. Telling about the progress his (then) very young son made. How he didn’t install a graphical user interface at first but the kid loved ‘sl’ (the steam locomotive if you mistype ‘ls’), and cowsay and so on. And they had a command-line chat to communicate (or just smash buttons).
My father was lucky, I wanted a minecraft server so bad that I accepted to learn how to handle an Ubuntu Server, with ~10 years.
Then I kinda had my edgy hacking phase with 12, and installed Kali as dual boot.
As my Windows install got older, dirtier and buggier, I decided to just f it and installed Pop over everything.
So, get them to be interested in having/doing something requiring Linux, then show them the wonders of the Linux desktop, preferably not Kali, but something more user friendly, and finally wait till they want to reinstall for whatever reason, like a new PC (with AMD or Intel GPU).
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