Any one here has any experience with teaching 8 to 12 years old kids Linux?
I have experience teaching Linux to adults only, but that seems to be funnier
I have no experience
But you might be interested in this:
https://www.opensourceforu.com/2018/04/kturtle-a-programming-language-for-children/
We did some MIT’s scratch together. I’ll give it a try as well.
Just introducing them to it is probably enough. Show them different desktop environments and applications to get them used to the idea of diverse interfaces and workflows. Just knowing that alternatives exist could help them break out of the Windows monoculture later. Enable all of the cool window effects.
KDEs wobbly windows will convert almost any child to linux.
Or the return of The Cube.
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.
Got my little brother (12) to run Minecraft on Linux mint,
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?
May be not a bad idea.
His screen time is currently limited and he’s been asking me to remove the limit. Guess I can let him dual boot into Mint without any screen time limit so that he can play around.
- harden parental controls on windows install.
- „hey son! I hardened the parental controls on your windows install. And by the way, I installed Linux to your PC as well. It has no parental controls.“
- ???
- Linux Sysadmin
there’s always the classic Sugar (the interface for the OLPC project)
Have’t heard of this before. Will check it out.
I’m teaching my son to be pc agnostic.
Yep, this is good as well. Use whatever suits the needs best, but I’d try and get him leaning towards the FOSS side - use other OSes only if you have to.
The only advice I have is to try to make it interesting for them and not just additional practical information they have to memorize. You don’t want to be the weird dad that insists on using stuff nobody else does, you have to show them what’s cool about it, and also accept maybe they’ll just stick with Windows for now.
I also think the main takeaway they should have out of it is that there’s many ways of doing the same thing and none is “the correct and only way”. They should learn to think critically, navigate unfamiliar user interfaces, learn some more general concepts and connect the dots on how things work, and that computers are logical machines, they don’t just do random things because they’re weird. Teach them the value of being able to dig into how it works even if it doesn’t necessarily benefit them immediately.
Maybe set up a computer or VM with all sorts of WMs and DEs with the express permission to wreck it if they want, or a VM they can set up (even better if they learn they can make their own VMs as well!). Probably have some games on there as well. Maybe tour some old operating systems for the historical context of how we got where we are today. Show them how you can make the computers do things via a terminal and it does the same thing as in the GUI. Show different GUIs, different file managers, different text/document editors, maybe different DE’s, maybe even tiling vs floating. What is a file, how are ways you can organize them, how you can move them around, how some programs can open other program’s files.
Teach them the computer works for them not the other way around. They can make the computer do literally anything they want if they wish so. But it’s okay to use other people’s stuff too.
You don’t want to be the weird dad that insists on using stuff nobody else does, you have to show them what’s cool about it, and also accept maybe they’ll just stick with Windows for now.
This 👆. Be weird, but be cool at the same time. None of the other dads can do this, but yours can 🦸 ☺️… and, he can teach you how to do a lot more cool stuff as well 😉.
For me what planted the Linux seed is when I tried Mandrake Linux when I was 9-10ish. I didn’t end up sticking with it for all that long, but I absolutely loved trying out all those DEs. I had downloaded the full fat 5 CD version and checked almost everything during setup, so it came jam packed with all sorts of random software to try out. The games were nice, played the shit out of Frozen Bubble. I really liked Konqueror too, coming from Internet Explorer. It was pretty snappy overall. And there’s virtual desktops for more space! People were really helpful on IRC, even though I was asking about installing my Windows drivers in Wine. Unfortunately I kinda wanted games and my friends were getting annoyed we couldn’t play games on my computer.
It stuck with me however, so later on when some of my online friends were trying it out, I wanted to try it out again too. I wasn’t much into games anymore, had started coding a little bit. So on my computer went Kubuntu 7.10, and I’m still on Linux to this day.
But that seed is what taught me there’s more. I didn’t hate Windows, I wasn’t looking to replace it. I hadn’t fallen in love with FOSS yet. It was cool and different and fun. It wasn’t as sterile and as… grey as Windows 98. You could pop up some googly eyes that followed your mouse, because you could. There were all those weird DEs with all sorts of bars and features.
Maybe a Steam Deck if they’re into gaming, boy do people love to tinker with their Decks.
But the deck can also be used for gaming with zero tinkering, so kids will do that.
Yes, he’ll just drop into Steam when something gets too hard to acomplish. I wouldn’t use the deck as a learning tool as well.
But when the time comes and the kid needs to write some assignments for school, you can be like Your Steam Deck can do that too, have a look at what this dock does
Imagine if handheld gaming is all they’ve ever used it and known it for, and all of a sudden you show them than it can be a full desktop experience, too
My mind would’ve been blown back when I was a kid
Your Steam Deck can do that too, have a look at what this dock does
Ah, of course 👍. Maybe like let him do the first few on his laptop and then be like “you know you can do that on the steam deck, right 😏” 😁.
I love Linux gaming. Got the Steam deck for my SO. She kind of hates it BECAUSE it’s not a no tinker device.
Like if you pick the right games you’re good, but want to play the “wrong” game, or want to mod, and your back to tinkering.
I don’t mind it at all, it’s just what PC gaming has been for me my whole life, but for her, someone who only experienced gaming on newer consoles it’s a pain in the tush.
Thanks! This is really helpful.
I also think the main takeaway they should have out of it is that there’s many ways of doing the same thing and none is “the correct and only way”. They should learn to think critically, navigate unfamiliar user interfaces, learn some more general concepts and connect the dots on how things work, and that computers are logical machines, they don’t just do random things because they’re weird. Teach them the value of being able to dig into how it works even if it doesn’t necessarily benefit them immediately.
This will come gradually. First, show him one way of doing things, let it sink in, let him get comfortable with it, then say “you know, you could do that in another way as well 😉”. I bet he’ll start asking you if there are other ways as well in no time 😂.
I taught adult education in college and always introduced people to computing with “DOS for Dummies” even though Windows was the OS they interacted with. By teaching them in a command line only environment first I could then easily teach them the desktop environment because they understood what was going on behind the scenes. I think the same could be done with Linux.
Yeah, but the kid has to be older, 12 is too young for that IMO.
Still, a Linux install with a DE will do nicely. He wants to do this and this, but there is no GUI for it, tell him to open up the terminal and type in the following commands, see what happens after you hit Enter… it always brings a smile, even with adults ☺️, they feel like they’re hackers or something 😂.
Then they usually wanna know what each of the commands and options do, and this is where I know I have a great student ☺️.
You can go with a little escape game, just put vim in Fullscreen and reward the first child getting out.
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.
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.
Well great but it’s probably a bit overkill to restrain food, you should consider adapting the food accordingly
Any kid? Do I have to prove age? I’ll install for a 1kg of basmati, or 3kg of potatos, 2kg of beans, 5kg of onions, or anything similar.
I just started them on Linux machines from the get go. The same reason I got good at 3.1/95/98 was to setup games, filesharing, and getting hardware to work for better games. Even with Steam, there’s always some work to handle oddities. The kids are rapidly becoming reasonable basic admins the same way I did. Whether they decide to go further and learn more will be up to them.
Hmm, I guess I’ll start by guiding him to deal with his PC problems by himself.
That’s a good start. Also, include him in your own PC activities (some of them, make some up if you don’t have anything that he can be involved in at the time), like “I need to find a cool new background, I was thinking this and this might be cool, could you help me find something online?”. It gives kids a sense of being useful and wanted, plus a pat on the back, high 5 or something like that when the task is done. And it might inspire him to look for his own background, something he identifies with 😉.
Have a lot smaller kid, he’s 4, but this is just something from the top of my head… or how I would play it.
You’re good
Thanks, I try ☺️.
It was hard for me at first, grasping how to bring up and educate him… it didn’t come naturally for me. But my mom was a lot of help, she gave me a lot of pointers and I just started building on that 😉.
All too much of OS config, IT work, and troubleshooting is a combination of reading docs, trying things, and plenty of online searches. The big missing piece is motivation. That’s why I learned as a kid. It was all about building systems to play games.
For your kids, a combination of showing the basics, how to find out how to fix things, giving them agency to modify the OS (assume you’ll need to reinstall sometime), and a purpose could get them going. Not everyone find the motivation and interest, but kids are often more able to invest and explore than we give them credit for. I found my son (at age 13) at installed the proprietary NVidia driver for his laptop without my knowing. He just started following tutorials until it worked. Proud dad moment, time for ice cream, and then he went back to playing games with his buddies.
How do you mean teach?
Just getting them to use it or teaching them terminal commands?
My son’s windows focused ICT curriculum is pissing me off a bit. So I guess what I wanna teach is something similar to what a kid’s ICT text book would teach, except that it will be for Linux.
Huh, may be I should look for kid friendly linux books first.
I don’t know what your - and your kid’s - situation is, but I worry pushing Linux onto someone would be counterproductive to getting them to like it.
I only use it because I genuinely like and appreciate it. I’d probably start by getting him interested in it. If he likes it enough then he’ll try and learn more by himself.
I recently got an LLM running locally on an AMD GPU. This was only possible on Linux. Depending on your son, something like that could be a cool way to get him interested.
Yeah, I also don’t wanna push it too hard.
Gonna be hard though. He’s way too into roblox these days.
Can you tell me something about what card you used to run what llm? What is its performance?
There is so little out there about this.
I have an RX6800XT and I use KoboldCPP to run models I download off of Huggingface.
I’m not sure how many tokens per second it generates, probably about 10?
If you want to try it yourself here’s a link to the Github page: https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp
