Or if you want to make them tech capable, another possibility is to give them a cheap Mac (apparently Apple is going to release a MacBook with an A-series SoC soon). You can open a terminal and show how it works, they can explore the filesystem with Finder, but when they need to do school work, they also have access to good DTP applications (Swift Publisher is really affordable and nice for kids), Affinity Designer/Photo, etc.

Our daughter initially had a Linux machine (also for the reasons you outlined). But she quickly ran into issues when doing work for school, collaborating with other kids, etc. So we gave her a Mac Mini M1. It was not very expensive, she can run many common apps (MS Office is a fact of life) and it's more secure (app sandboxing, sealed system volume, etc). But many of her skills are be transferrable to Linux if needed (in contrast to using an iPad or Android tablet).

My kid used an ancient HP laptop that found new life as a Hackintosh. Was rock solid for his early HS needs. Side bonus was the peer admiration he got around it.

That’s so awesome! I started using Macs after my brother and I were dabbling with Hackintosh in 2007 (mostly just trying it for fun). Unfortunately, it didn’t work on my laptop, but after seeing Hackintosh on his, I decided to get a Mac Mini.

So cool that your kid was able to use a Hackintosh in high school!

>People usually stick to whatever they learned and played with during childhood

Any source for this? I grown on Atari, DOS and Windows. Most kids today are on mobile or consoles.

Linux does not need advertising, it is by far the best option from point of hardware selection, development, gaming and ease of use.

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I think nerds like us are more likely to experiment and make occasional drastic changes to our computing setup. And in my case I grew up during a time when there was a lot of change in the desktop OS landscape, so sticking with one OS from my childhood to adulthood wasn’t really possible (otherwise I’d still be on Microsoft BASIC and OS-9).

Familiarity and “just-workitude” really are by far the most important factors for people picking OSs, and these days it’s possible to stick with one platform for decades.

> Linux does not need advertising, it is by far the best option from point of hardware selection, development, gaming and ease of use.

Gaming? No. Hardware selection? Lol absolutely not.

This is even more important now as younger generations are just given iPads and other locked down devices, to the point where they have to learn how to navigate a file system in their introductory university courses.

> to the point where they have to learn how to navigate a file system in their introductory university courses.

What happened to IT lessons at school? I had IT starting at the age of 13 onwards, and that was in the early 2000s. By the time you graduated from school, you were guaranteed to have at least basic IT skills.

I think those classes/lessons were added when the availability of computers were kind of so and so, not every kid had a computer at home but most adults at the time understood that computers will be used in the kids future one way or another, so they figured everyone should know it.

At one point it shifted to "everyone has a computer at home" to "everyone has a computer in their pocket, and learns typing by themselves" and the classes seems to have disappeared.

> when the availability of computers were kind of so and so,

I think in the early/mid 2000s most families already had a PC at home. At least all of my friends did.

> "everyone has a computer in their pocket, and learns typing by themselves"

Yeah, that seems to be the sentiment. Of course we all know this is completely wrong.

My IT lessons in the 90s were “here’s how to use spreadsheets and Microsoft office”. It wasn’t until later that I was taught programming and other more foundational concepts that would take me beyond being an office worker that knew how to format and print a letter. Fortunately, I had computers at home and my parents encouraged me to learn how they worked.

> My IT lessons in the 90s were “here’s how to use spreadsheets and Microsoft office”.

Same for me. But these are actually usefull skills and I find it strange that they wouldn't be taught anymore.

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Agree It drives me nuts that at school they give them tablet rather than pcs. All the work happens on pcs, not tablets.

My kids have kubuntu on some old laptops and will have linux everywhere. Hopefully it is ok to maintain that,I'm afraid of school forcing incompatible software