Got my little brother (12) to run Minecraft on Linux mint,

They like playing SuperTux

You can only teach someone Linux if they have a desire to learn it. If they don’t want to learn it, then they might learn that it’s “bad” or “weird” compared to mainstream OSes, which would be working backwards.

I have experience teaching Linux to adults only, but that seems to be funnier

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Linux distributions that you can #introduce to your kids. This way, they can begin using and learning Linux

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https://www.tecmint.com/best-linux-distributions-for-kids/

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.

You can go with a little escape game, just put vim in Fullscreen and reward the first child getting out.

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.

For reference about 4 year olds: https://lifehacker.com/i-raised-my-kids-on-the-command-line-and-they-love-it-5974087

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).

Don’t start with the tinkering aspect first.

Ask yourself, why does your kid use Windows?

Probably to play games, access the internet and maybe do their homework. Most probably, they don’t use Windows because they specifically enjoy working with Windows, but because it easily lets them do whatever they actually want to do on a PC.

Spending 5h on fixing some weird incompatibility between the Nvidia GPU, your DE and Proton might be fun for some, but it’s most probably not what your kid wants to do when they could be gaming or doing whatever they actually want to do. Problems like that can scare them off quickly.

So first setup the PC so that everything they usually do on Windows works without issues.

The next question is, why would your kid want to run Linux instead of Windows?

The usual advantages (FOSS, free to use, better for developers) don’t really matter to most kids. The only things I can think of right now are:

• Runs on PCs that aren’t Win11 compatible
• Some games like Minecraft run faster (but some games also run slower)

With the setup completed and advantages thought of, you can let the kid use Linux quite similarly to Windows. When the kid wants new software or has an issue, work together with them to get everything running. First do everything and let them watch, later let them do more and more of the process.

That’s basically it.

When I was 12 I got “tricked” into installing Linux Mint from a USB drive because another kid told me it had Garageband on it.

Like that meme where you give someone a bunch of adderall and a pickaxe and tell them there’s gold under a location you need excavated.

Perhaps you could explore adjacent strategies?

Teacher here.

My favourite “lesson” I ever gave was in a grade 9 technology class. It was a pretty small class, about 10 kids. I split them up into two teams and made a competition. They chose their own teams — it ended up being boys vs girls. I never would have made it that way on my own but that’s how it worked out.

The school had a bunch of old, decommissioned PCs that were headed to the junk yard. I sorted through all of them to get two exact sets of working parts for the competition.

The goal of the competition was to recover a jpeg from one of the hard drives. Each team had a computer with the ram removed and two hard drives. One was blank and the other had the jpeg on it. They also had a Linux Mint installer on a usb stick.

I don’t remember exactly how I had set it up but it was points based, something about getting to different stages first. Like 5 points to be the team that turns the computer on first. One of the big ones was that they got an extra 10 points if they did the whole thing without a mouse.

I told the other classes about the competition and asked some other teachers if it would be okay for them to watch and cheer on. It ended up being the nerdiest and most exciting class ever. Students were literally cheering each team through a Linux install. One team got stuck and had to pull out the mouse. There was booing. It was so epic.

The girls won, being the first to recover the jpeg and they did it all without a mouse. It was so awesome. The jpeg was the meme about how would a dog wear pants.

It was about 5 years ago, my first year teaching. I really miss those days. I only teach math now, and while I like that, there was something magical about showing kids how fun computers can be.

A friend of mine got his son to use Linux by just not providing an alternative, he installed Debian edu (don’t know if that’s the name, but basically a Debian spin for kids with parental restrictions and stuff) on an old laptop for him and that’s what he used. Once he got his own PC it was over though since he wanted to play Fortnite so bad that he bought windows for that. He still dual boots Fedora, but I don’t think he has used it since the windows partition is there.

I think the thing is you can’t really get kids (or people in general for that matter) into Linux the way you are probably into it and interested in it. At least not if they’re not already interested in it on their own. They will learn how to use it sure, but not the way we’re used to using Linux, understanding the intricacies of the system, keeping the system safe,… They’ll probably find a way to do what they already do on windows and ignore that the OS is different.

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).

I’m teaching my son to be pc agnostic.