My brother is 12 and just like other people of his age he can’t use a computer properly because he is only familiar with mobile devices and dumbed-down computers
I recently dual-booted Fedora KDE and Windows 10 on his laptop. Showed him Discovery and told him, “This is the app store. Everything you’ll ever need is here, and if you can’t find something just tell me and I’ll add it there”. I also set up bottles telling him “Your non-steam games are here”. He installed Steam and other apps himself
I guess he is a better Linux user than Linus Sebastian since he installed Steam without breaking his OS…
The tech support questions and stuff like “Can you install this for me?” or “Is this a virus?” dropped to zero. He only asks me things like “What was the name of PowerPoint for Linux” once in a while
After a week I have hardly ever seen my brother use Windows. He says Fedora is “like iOS” and he absolutely loved it
I use Arch and he keeps telling me “Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”. He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
lol he’s already a true linux user.
But probably best to have a talk about gatekeeping linux though. There’s no wrong way to run linux.
haha I thought exactly the same thing lol He’s linuxplained why his distro is better. That’s the spirit.
I mean, there are definitely wrong ways to run Linux, like a single root user with no password, but your point is well taken. If Linux fanboys would keep the subjective gatekeeping to themselves the new user experience would be much more pleasant.
Or a disabled root account with unconfigured sudo and/or doas
This is a lovely story
I absolutely lost it the first time he called me a nerd for using Arch and straight up started doing Fedora elitism lmao
Time to become a toxic arch elitist user now.
“Is this a virus?”
Your 12-year-old brother is more security-conscious than most of the adults I work with.
Non techies have two settings. Either everything is a virus or nothing is a virus.
Still better security consciousness than 99% of the population.
Nah, my father is one of those who thinks everything is a virus, especially emails. And so he installs all kind of “clean your PC from viruses”-software …
Tell him that those are viruses too
That’s because everything is a virus.
I remember an old story about a father deleting bat.exe off the family computer and blaming his son for breaking the computer with his Batman game.
He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
Complaining about what works for other people? It is tradition. It’s innate Linux user behavior.
He’s learning
The children yearn for the distro wars
He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
Your brother is the wise guy of the bell curve
Or he’s currently on the left, and he’ll be on the bell’s top by the time @[email protected] is on the other side?
On another note, I feel this so much. I went from “Mint seems comfortable”, to “Ooh slackware, i3 WM, running Arch with i3 completely built up and customised by none other than me!” back to “I can set shortcuts in Mint, and it’s comfier there anyway”
“Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”.
Because nerdy terminal shit is cool.
explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
😂
Did you add Flathub or rpmfusion? the store without those things is kinda barren
yup I did
My kids have been gaming all day on Steam. They have zero intellectual curiosity about the system they are using. They have been using Arch for years but it might as well be a console or Mac. They log in and launch a web browser, Steam or a Minecraft launcher and that is it. It makes me a bit sad.
You have to give them a reason to get interested in the OS and the programs they’re using. I gave Linux a try because I was concerned about privacy and I wanted to use more ethical and user respecting OS and software than what I used at that time. Linux and the FOSS world was an obvious choice for me. Custom ROM on Android was sort of the bridge which allowed me to transition. If it wasn’t for that, I would still be on Windows and I wouldn’t learn that much on how an operating system works and what differentiate them, aside from the look. The fact they’re kids or that they play games have nothing to do with it: a lot of adults don’t know either what type of OS they’re using, despite it being in their best interest. The problem is that we don’t give or show them the reason they should be interested, or at least be curious about it and most of time, before people get a degree, we end up killing their curiosity.
As they play Minecraft, you can advise them to switch to Prism Launcher instead of the minecraft launcher, especially if they mod the game, it’s much better for that. It could be a good start.
To be fair, my curiosity for the system when I was a kid came from having a win98 computer without internet or any games installed, other than some freemium CDs and a neo-geo emulator.
I’d spend time just going through the menus, and I had no idea how anything worked, but it was interesting just seeing what was there. Also I spoke no English at all, so many things were out of my reach/understanding.
If I had Steam and Minecraft? I wouldn’t have explored the OS so much. Probably. That stemmed out of boredom as much as from curiosity.
The fact that they’re gaming on it means they’ll know how to use it later
When I was that age I didn’t think much about the system I was using, it doesn’t really appeal to kids but they’ll still be learning
Do you do the updates or do they do it through terminal? My sibling running Ubuntu is fine with it because it’s easy and the update is a button.
I fully manage our machines as they are a resource shared by the whole family and used for work, study and play. We do have old machines, electronics, home server, arduino etc available for tinkering if they are interested and there is a lot that can be done in user space if they were interested so I don’t know that they are missing out.
It is possible to do arch updates from a gui but arch occasionally requires manual interventions. These are normally documented through arch announce and easily searchable if an update breaks some functionality but intervention usually requires the console and I am fine with that. In my experience debian and variants do offer a simpler update experience since you are usually only applying security updates within your current release. If they were on a stable Debian based distro I would probably setup unattended automatic security updates. Arch is more like a refined Debian Sid.
From now on I’m only refering to arch as “the nerd OS”
What does that make Gentoo?
The OS for masochists?
My elderly mother has been using Linux for almost 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a single tech support phone call from her for it
My older sibling did something similar - getting Ubuntu installed on my very first laptop (a 9" netbook) back in 2008 and replacing windows XP. But be warned: it is a slippery slope. At the time , I just wanted a computer that I could take class notes on (high school), and never wanted to touch programming or the terminal. Now I have a PhD in computer science. I still don’t use Arch though.
Tech literacy amongst the youth is rapidly going down. Good on you.
An amazing story! I doubt I ever have kids, but if I do I’ll do something like this. God knows what sort of dumbed down tech crap they’ll be fed in school.
My 11 year old brother had been using PopOS for a while. Unfortunately Roblox recently intentionally broke Wine support and I had to put Windows on his computer.
My grandfather uses Ubuntu (bad distro bruh) and he loves it
