squaresinger, 1 year ago

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.