Re: [Fsfe-uk] Linux for Kids Briefing

[Richard Smedley]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 10:34, Philip Hands wrote:

> P.S.  I'm a Debian fundamentalist, so all my experience is filtered 
> through my distorted belief that Debian is bette

But that's not a distorted belief ;-)

Getting back to the original point on the thread: -

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 00:14, Paul wrote: 
> Nice. I disagree though over the choice of distro. Richard 

Good choice of name ;-)

> (my 6 year
> old) has had a linux box (or access to a linux box) since he was 2 and
> all of them have been RH or FC boxes. He's never had a moments trouble.
> 
> Personally, I would advise the use of FC or Mandark. I'd never recommend
> Debian. I just don't like it as a distro - it certainly is easy to get
> running (but then so is FC, SuSE and Mandark), but it's not as good as
> it's cracked up to be. I'd prefer to use Slackware over Debian!

Accepting for a moment that there are people who want to
use Free *nix distros other than Debian GNU ;-P....

Surely all parents of under-10s are /admins/, and should
decide what distro to run on the basis of their admin
preferences, as they'll be the one to fix it.

As to what the children like - that's in user-land, and
easily added on. I run Debian on my desktops with Ion2,
my kids seem to prefer fluxbox, so that is what they have
on their machines (except the legacy non-free software one,
which runs Irix).

iow Run what you like, and put what the kids like on top of
it - they'll be happy while it works, and you'll fix it
more quickly when (not if) they break something :-)

 - Richard,
long-suffering family admin ;-)