• 2 Posts
  • 82 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 18th, 2021

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  • Yeah that’s a sad situation. I suppose you already know about the dangers for the future of our children of not having access to software code and one big company having control over our devices and surveillance capitalism and blah blah blah so I won’t waste your time with that again. Every context is different, every mind is different. Hope you succeed in giving this child what will be best for his future. Good luck and congratulations for your motivation!




  • For me this answer is biased. I am a technology teacher and father of five. Had great experience with Linux. Get them on the free ecosystem with no barriers! That’s the best educational environment. Kturtle, gcompris. Krita. Inkscape. Scratch. Godot. Freecad. Gimp. Libresprite/Aseprite. More than enough to keep you busy. I grew up with DOS. The best fuel for me learning computing was trying to make games run. Nowadays everything tries to be so easy and simple and that’s great but sometimes it has an educational drawback. Linux is so much easier for kids than for adults who are already used to windows/Mac. Edit: you could also start with i3wm. That’s what I did with my kids. Of course, the hard part of that is not them learning, but you first learning it so you can show it to them. Have an eye on that and adjust difficulty depending on your time for this project. If you don’t have that much time and willingness to learn yourself, just go KDE plasma or other.


  • Really really please install gnulinux on that child’s computer. He will be grateful for life. If you install windows he might not hate it but he’ll never know what he missed. He will get used to that and will be hard for him in the future to get out of the windows ecosystem. my humble experience installing hundreds of Linux systems: childrenand young are the best adopters. You can do it and ask for help here or on other channels if needed. Maybe go for Linux mint Debian edition.




  • Yeah I understand your practical/functional approach. But I think the approach that sounds radical to you might also be a practical one that considers long term and big scale effects. I mean, the same happens in many aspects of life. Sometimes you do something in a more difficult way because you bet it will bring you benefits in the long term. Sometimes it really pays over but other times you think it will bring you benefits (and for example instead of doing something manually you write a script that does it) but you miss it and end spending more time on the job than if you’ve had just solved your specific problem manually. When we talk about sociology, politics and other complex subjects that go beyond our short term/personal benefit impact, we really frequently don’t have the knowledge to make the best decisions, so we kinda guess based on our experience and convictions. I think that’s what making us disagree right now.





  • A lot of us here are on the same boat. We don’t know each other but deal with these same issues. We know the truth behind proprietary software and surveillance capitalism and we know that we can only succeed in our efforti if we bring together our loved ones. We need to find the best language and ways to let people know the reality behind the software they use, the dangers of using it, and the marvelous solutions of the free software community. We are a community. Let’s hold ourselves together and keep going. The world may be based in libre software in the future. If it doesn’t, it will be not a good place to live on. But at least we tried. If not for us, for the ones that’ll come in the future.