Moving Your Kids to Linux?

telecaster asks: "My kids are aged 11, 7 and 3. All of them are computer savvy. They use the computer for basically three things: Games, writing papers and chatting with friends, as well as browsing sites that are frequented by children their age (Nick, Cartoon Network, How Things Work, Yahoo!Kids, and others). All of this is supervised and watched by my wife and I -- we don't use any parental filters since we've found they just don't work, and it's just better to keep a watchful eye anyway. I would like to move them off Windows XP and introduce them to something less expensive (free) and more reliable. I'm rebooting this machine probably four and five times a week, not to mention the forever problem of lockups and hangs which seem to happen during the times where the 3 year-old is using the machine. I know the crashes are mainly due to the older games that the kids play which are not totally compatible with XP, but hey, they USED to run just fine under Windows98."

"My real motivation to do this is to save money and to teach my children that sometimes the best isn't always the most expensive. Also, being the cheap bastard that I am, I'm looking at all the money we've spent on Windows XP, Office and all the games over the years, and I'm wondering if there isn't a way to slowly supplant Linux into the mix and not sacrifice my children's computer experience but at the same time save some money and teach them something new.

My requirements are simple: I would like them to run their CD-ROM based games (which are mostly Director based games from Hasbro), and I would still like them to chat with their friends and also be able to play online Flash and Shockwave based games from Yahoo and Shockwave.

I believe I'm looking at an OpenOffice situation to replace Office, I suppose that would be fine and I think would work out (they aren't required to have perfect Word compatibility, its basically type a paper, and print it). For chat we're probably OK too, because something like GAIM would be fine -- Jabber based things would also be cool.

But my real concern is the CD-ROM games and Windows based games. I can't see my 3 year-old putting a CD-ROM into the drive and expecting it to auto-load and run like it does on XP -- without issues -- even with a perfect installation of WINE, hey, maybe I'm wrong, but is there a way to have it work as good as windows?

I've thought about loading up Mandrake and getting WINE working to see if it'll work out, but I'm not sure that I should waste my time, so I thought I'd ask some readers here if they're run into this situation and if I'm just crazy for thinking that this would be the wise thing to do at the expense of my children's computing experience."

Comments

Kids..

[grub]

There's a good chance your kids are already into Linux 1f 7hey t4lkx0r l1k3 7h15x0rz, 51lly f4gg0rz. :P

Re:CLI is good for kids

[PopeFelix]

CLI is not good for kids! Why, I got the CLI when I took a trip to New Orleans some years ago, and I haven't been able to pee properly since!

Re:my kids

[gengee]

It's never good for parents to impose their religious values on their children. Expose them to different options, and let them make the choice for themselves.

Don't deprive your child of vi. Hell, who knows, maybe he'll grow up to be a nano user:P

Re:Here's an idea...

[geronimo_jerry]

waaaaaa my pussy hurts. get a life you weak lil twerp. i've been using command line based OS's since 1982 and i am no worse for wear.

as for this entire sub-thread, kids should be "indoctrinated" ASAP. the entire world will revolve around computers in their future, starting at age 3 isn't too early.

frankly, i wish i woulda started earlier.