My brother wants to start his kids with homeschooling at the start of the year and pull them out of the public school system. The district he is in, let’s just say they are not doing right by their students. He has two boys, one is 9 and the other is 11. He wants to set up a few computers for them to use that are kid-friendly for educational purposes. Needless to say, he wants a solid Linux distro for something like this. Any suggestions? I am not sure what to recommend.
I would say UberMix as it is based on Ubuntu and very straightforward and easy to learn/use for both students and teachers. I believe there are educational app included as well. I have not used it myself but I know someone who does for homeschooling purposes.
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Sugar is a good one for kids but I don’t know the age range. It might be considered for younger children than 9 and 11. You can give it a try and see what you think or have your brother look into it a bit more.
I think most beginner friendly Linux distros can be set up easily for children in terms of educational purposes though.
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Most learning and education resources are online these days so the distro doesn’t really matter so much. Just go with one that is easy to use and navigate. Likely something similar to Windows such as Zorin.
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This ^
I was going to say similar. You can basically take just about any distro and have it function as an educational platform for kids. You just stock all the programs they need. You can use safety net programs as well to keep them off sites you don’t want them using too.
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You might want to suggest that he consider and look into a Chromebook which uses a version of Linux and includes most free utilities to allow his to do most everything he needs. Also the cost is considerably less as well. My grade school grandkids all use chromebooks supplied by the school system.
Just sayin’
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Debian has an educational release. I’ve never used it but it’s supposed to be for kids, it has information on it here: Debian Edu Pure Blend
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Thanks for all the suggestions. I am going to look into all these tonight and see what I think would work best and talk to him about it. If I have any questions about any of them, I’ll be back!
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Overall, if he wants something that you just install and get going with then Sugar would be the ideal one to go with. You can set the age and everything on there which makes it easier for some parents to get things going. That being said, I do agree that the programs and software matter more than the distro itself.
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He seems to be leaning in the direction of using this one at the moment. I think I will see if I can manage to set up another one with educational programs ready to go and see which he prefers.
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If I were your brother, I would go with openSUSE Leap with GNOME Shell. It is very stable. I install it for most families that ask for my help on this and I have never had any complaint of any technical hiccups. I think that the pre installed apps in it’s default KDE Plasmas Educational Suite like KStars, Kalzium provide a good starting point. It also allows every child to create his own visually stimulating workspace free from distraction.