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What would be the best setup to ease my niece (10) into tux land? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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Watched my niece yesterday and while we were playing Minecraft she noticed that my laptop "windows n stuff" didn't look lik the schools computers and I told her about linux and she got rly interested and now she wants a laptop "just lik mine" which is runnin Linux Mint

She's somewhat technical apt, for a 10 year old, and I could probs dig up a decent laptop for her but not sure if I should jus dump mint on a laptop for her and let her have at it or something else?

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[–] 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)

KDE and showing her the effect customisations are key. My daughter went nuts with those when she was ten. Wobbly windows for life!

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    GNOME user here. Also love wobbly windows. Must be innate human nature.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    kde would prob be a bit more intuitive/easier to customize for a kid, i do prefer gnome my self, I also use wobbly + burn my windows

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I dunno, I think the most confusing part of GNOME is that the dock is hidden, but you can disable that. Afterwards I don't see any difference from the "tap/click the thing you want to open it" functions of any device.

    My kids use ChromeBooks at school, and GNOME on mine at home. They once asked why my computer was so complicated but it turned out it was only because I normally have 15 or 20 windows open at once 😅

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    On cachyos gnome it wasn't immediately obvious how to grab extensions and that they even existed, so at first I was like f this and immeidately swapped to kde, only used it out of necessity because the global menu had issues and it was faster/easier to install another de over reinstalling my os and grabbing my apps again. Then after googling I realized the extension store exists and now I love it, but yeah it was initially off putting, I didn't have a gnome user around to tell me whats possible or a de with extensions already enabled to view.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I will admit GNOME is more opinionated and trying to customize it too much gets pretty hard, but I like the default workflow with just a few tweaks. I definitely understand people who prefer KDE because they can make it how they like it, but I never could get KDE to act how I wanted it but GNOME is pretty much already what I want.

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