Awesome question. And good advice here. To add something: Don’t just give them games. Hook up an old printer, install LibreOffice plus the openclipart images. Kids can make everything into a game. We used to play with my dad’s old pc and imagined being private investigators and had our own little office. We printed out lots of silly stuff and took notes on the computer. There are a few ‘learn typing on a keyboard’ games, but back then I didn’t have fun with them.
Maybe they like drawing, install TuxPaint, Krita. Or video editing or recording stuff, give them a webcam/phone and Kdenlive. Have them do a spoof on a movie or do their own Lego stop-motion film. Or they like to make music, install Audacity’s sucessor, LMMS, a drum sequencer …
And of course the whole kids-education metapackage if your distribution has one. So they can program little turtles and start coding with Python. You can do this at age 8, depending on the kids personality.
It works best if it’s tied somehow into their lives. For example (occasionally) printing homework assignments, a stop-motion suite if they play a lot with Lego anyways…
Other than that, my boy scout education tells me to “look at the boy”. Have them explore and see that they like. Assist and teach them how to operate the software they want to use. Help them once they get stuck or can’t figure something out on their own. You will have to guide them and show how they can achieve the results they want, so they stay motivated.
Give them background knowledge and tell them the 'why’s. Why something is the way it is. I’d say that is the point where we get to Linux. At age 10 or so, you don’t necessarily care about an operating system. But you’re curious and happy to learn why there are different ones and why they behave differently and the story behind that. And the thing that hooks you is the possibilities and usefulness for your life. So that’s why I recommend installing lots of useful (to kids) software.
And maybe give them a chat / instant-messenger program. So they can contact you and ask questions.
As it is with teaching generally, it heavily depends on how you do it. Kids are very curious by default. In my experience: “Look at the boy” has served me well. Kids come in a wide variety. Don’t teach them top-down but find a mix of letting them explore and roam, but also make sure to teach them the basics first. And guide them how to apply things to their life and find use-cases and the fun in it. If you pay attention to them, you can adjust your own behaviour.
This is also how I got hooked to computers as a kid as well. The problem nowadays though is the internet and easy access to addictive internet services and games. Back then, you’re stuck with what’s on your PC and somehow have to make the most out of it.
Mmh. Sure, I don’t have kids so I probably lack some experience in how it is today.
I’m not sure if trying to compete with the attention-grabbing games is what whe should aim for. Sure kids love Roblox and Minecraft, and watching lets-play videos for days on end…
But there is no educational aspect in just giving them all the games. And they won’t become invested in the underlying concepts and the world of free software and computers if all you do is replicate a gaming pc and provide them with a flawless Steam/Proton experience. The computer as a tool and the operating system is irrelevant for just gaming. And it isn’t (in my eyes) what makes computers and Linux appealing.
I wouldn’t even attempt to compete with that. Sure, give them SuperTuxKart, PPracer and maybe a Minetest world (with mods and animals and NPCs so the world isn’t just the empty and boring default one).
I don’t really know how to pry a modern child out of games and videos. Maybe restrict their time with that. Show them alternatives and how to use the computer as a tool. Start a project together with them. Maybe design a calender as a gift for someone, or get them started with the stop-motion movie, or music studio. You could also (dis)assemble the PC together with them and install Linux so they learn about the components. Unfortunately this all really requires time, attention and dedication from the adult and I see no way around that. And the child also needs to become interested in that aspect. But you need to start somewhere. I would really try to advertise this as something more than an alternative gaming platform and make some sort of distinction between the two.
[I know how it was back them with old computers and without the internet. We had a super old, decommissioned PC from my dad. The choice of games was somewhat limited and we had to become innovative. I learned programming relatively early, because Commander Keen or the old flight simulator wasn’t as enticing as the modern games are and you got bored after a few days. With some games we got stuck or some were pirated and in English, which i didn’t speak back then. So I definitely did a good amount of gaming, even back then. But we weren’t allowed to do it indefinitely and we also sat in front of the PC with friends and took turns. I suppose this is different now that everyone has their own Nintendo Switch. The world has changed since and trying to go back isn’t the right thing to do. But I believe the underlying concepts, trying to do more than just gaming and passive entertainment, restricting their access to it and provide them with alternatives, if you got the time to spare, is a good thing.]
(Apart from that, I’ve been with the boy scouts for quite some time. We always did some projects in the rainy autumn and winter. Even the roblox-kids from today like to do other things like hands-on projects, handicraft work to carpentry. But you have to find a way to reach them. Once they managed to get some nice results, it becomes easier and they become invested themselves.)
For me it was the opposite. I had Ubuntu installed and wanted to do a upgrade to the next release, took around 2 hours “settings things up” where I just said fuck it and force closed it.
My experience with big release distros was like that. I rarely had an upgrade complete without issue. Rolling release has been good to me so far. Granted, this was 10 years ago and things gave probably gotten better since.
I like EndeavourOS (Arch based) and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (or Gecko Linux). But if you prefer sticking with apt based distro Debian Sid is a rolling release.
I think so, but from what I hear it is pretty stable, enough to use. I’d keep backups of important files, but I do that anyway. I use the Branched release myself, but an aquaintance of mine uses rawhide.
I used Manjaro in 2015 for about a year before switching to Arch and sticking with that for a long time. Recently I tried EndeavorOS for a few months, then I switched to Void just to try it.
Can I use MS Office natively with that? Also, can I use it as a non-techie lay man in a way that is similar to the way most office bottom-feeders use Windows?
I know there is Open Office but I am lawyer and the free office alternatives just don’t have the rich formatting options I need to do my job. I have tried and they just won’t do.
ToC via Styles formatting and Table of authorities - these are from the top of my head, which I remember not working properly with Open Office. They need to work when I do them and also should be displayed correctly when I receive them from colleagues in docx format.
Format painter, track changes, spell checker in two languages, intendation adjustments, page breaks, and paste as text - I use these like crazy but I don’t remember if they were OK in Open Office or not.
honestly Libreoffice is not on par with MS Office. I use MS at work and Linux at home and Libreoffice is great for general use, but it is very rough around the edges, and does not have all the capability that MS does. I wish it were not the case but lack of an excellent office suite is one weaknesses of Linux.
In my opinion, it stacks up VERY well, even better, except the toolbar is by-default a mess for some reason while there's a very easy option to set it to tabbed.
How does the UI size work out for you? I recently took a look at it on a windows pc and the tiny size of most things is the one problem I have with it. Then again, I read something about being able to scale different programs individually somewhere (not for windows though)
First of all, libre office is very competent but I understand that it’ll always be very behind whetever Microsoft decides to do next.
Office is available on all systems at office365.com if you must use Microsoft tools.
For the non-tech usage, very much yes. Most of the problems your hear about with linux stem from people trying to make it do stuff that you can’t dream of doing on windows because it will stop you. Simply installing a system and using it to browse the web, edit documents, maybe install a few popular programs like VLC or Discord is set-and forget. System installers have recently gotten much more noob-friendly as well, imo the debian and Pop!OS installers don’t really allow you to mess up. KDE is a good choice of DE, but you might be more confortable with others. Good news, you can decide later, as switching desktop Environments is easy and preserves your files.
Not the full suite, natively. You can install it via PlayonLinux, which works well without fiddling, or you can use Office 365 on the web.
Also, can I use it as a non-techie lay man in a way that is similar to the way most office bottom-feeders use Windows?
Yes.
I know there is Open Office but I am lawyer and the free office alternatives just don’t have the rich formatting options I need to do my job. I have tried and they just won’t do.
Open Office is deprecated. You can use LibreOffice which is free. Or WPS Office or SoftMaker Office, which run on Linux and are 100% compatible with MS Office, but cost money.
Last I used it, it seemed to lack a lot of more advanced features. I think I especially stumbled over the bibliography, though I did not use any add-ons.
The 545 drivers are very buggy, at least for me. I downgraded to 535,hopefully we get an usable 545 soon. Also, if you feel like it you can report the issue in the nvidia forums, it might get some visibility there.
DVI should not control the monitor’s actual physical controls - it does include a small non-display channel but IIRC that’s used to get the display modes info from the monitor, and potentially to transmit contrast information and the like; some monitors will prevent you from adjusting contrast if DVI sends that info for example, but it certainly shouldn’t disable the power button.
My guess would be a hardware issue - in the monitor itself - which is somehow triggered by the sequence in which you do enable the displays, and your system update being unrelated. It’s a huge guess though. One thing to try is repeating both sequences (the one that locks your buttons and the one that doesn’t) using a live CD - not a “nobara 38” one if such a thing exists, another distro. Trying both monitors on another computer would be an interesting test as well, although not necessarily that helpful (because if it doesn’t occur there, it might just mean the issue is triggered by peculiarities in your graphic card).
So I decided to bite the bullet and did a fresh install of Fedora 39 and that appeared to have made the issue go away. In the process of installing updates and configuring it the way I like, the monitor control buttons on both monitors response. So, it seems like the cause of the issue could have been a glitch during an update. Who knows? At least I know that it’s not a hardware issue (cross finders). :)
As pointed out, they don’t use it. However, there are loose plan for KWin to migrate to wlroots one day, and in fact a hostile fork exists that is exactly that (KWinFT). So a compositor can make use of wlroots to implement Wayland functionality, sway for example does exactly that, unsurprisingly since they’re sister projects by the same author.
It should be noted that libwayland (mentioned in the patch notes) also exist, and wlroot actually depends on it, so I guess libwayland is like the lower level stuff while wlroots saves you some work to integrate libwayland into your compositor; the motto is “Pluggable, composable, unopinionated modules for building a Wayland compositor; or about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway.”
wlroots is a library that can be used to implement a compositor like KWin or mutter (GNOME). In practice wlroots is used in Sway, Hyprland, river, and more.
What wlroots-based compositors, KWin, and mutter share is that they implement a similar set of the display protocol Wayland. E.g. KWin and Sway implement the Wayland extension wlr_layer_shell
Mine was Mandrake 6. RedHat 5.2 was my first, and I was surprised how much easier Mandrake was in comparison. But the one that really wowed me was SuSE (before they became OpenSUSE), I was blown away how polished and user-friendly it was. Windows 9x/ME felt like a joke in comparison at time. And some people still claim Linux isn’t user friendly… and I’m like, bruh it’s been user friendly for about three decades now…
I’m not tied to anything at this stage, but I don’t have a lot of free time for trying different stuff. Can I install this DE alongside cinnamon, like I have with i3?
Kind of… The problem with full DEs like GNOME and KDE is that they pull in a lot of dependencies and make a lot of changes. So it can break visuals or change icons in each others environments or install apps with duplicate functions. Something like i3 has a lot less clutter because it expects the user to build their own environment.
The best way to try out KDE would be to install it under a new user on your system so it doesn’t conflict with your original home directory. Or you could boot up a live image of Kubuntu or some other KDE flavored Linux distro and mess around with it a bit to see if you want to commit to it.
While you can install KDE on mint without issues (apt install kde-plasma-desktop) I would recommend installing a KDE focused distro because sometimes they have better default configs.
But Plasma should be able to do win + arrow keys out of the box and current versions of Plasma should have basic tiling functions by dragging a window around and holding shift. If there’s anything you don’t like it’s a very configurable platform.
Some computer games and other graphics intensive apps are using vulkan, and they will now work with an nvidia card without needing to go get nvidias proprietary driver, which is often buggy due to not being properly tested with your desktop and system in general.
i.e file is created (as non-root), trying to remove the file (once again, as non-root) gives me a “rm: cannot remove ‘dir/file.name’: Permission denied” error message.
OK I see. Can you create a new file with nano and then do an “ls -l” so we can see the permissions it’s given? Also provide the output of the command “umask” as the user you’re working with.
That is not an elevated permission, your user should be able to delete that file, do the same in another directory if it works it might be a permission, or more likely an attribute, problem on the directory itself or something on the path to it.
What are the permissions on the directory? What is command are you running to edit the file? What command are you running to delete it? (Have you got selinux turned on? What filesystem is this directory on?)
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