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Tips for kid workstations

Hi, I switched my desktop to Linux full time many months ago and I'm never going back. My kids want gaming PCs for Minecraft, Roblox, fortnight, etc. Kid games for now.

Hardware

I've been planning to show my kids how to build their own computers, and I think I can 2 for 1 this. My current PC is a prebuilt Ibuypower, and the last computer I assembled had an AGP slot. I know spinning metal is out generally. Other than picking an AMD graphics card what tips can you offer me?

Software

I want to give them the opportunity to learn and fail, so I don't think I would go with an immutable distro. Thoughts? Assuming a separate /home I think having to reinstall once in a while is a good lesson.

Firefox with full add blocking of course.

Is there an application for managing screen time, and while they're still little I'd be interested in some kind of blocking/filtering.

Thanks folks!

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  • I set my kid up with Silverblue recently. After seeing it in use for a bit, as a power user I think it's got some obnoxious compromises, and NixOS is a much better way to get the same benefits, and encourages safe experimentation at every level of the system. But for a beginner-friendly system that is very stable I think ostree distros like Silverblue make sense. Mostly stuff works fine, but you want to break out rpm-ostree occasionally to get a native package.

    I have another kid on Fedora as a control. So far things are fine. Previously I had both kids on Manjaro, but they weren't able to keep up with upgrades long-term (over the course of a few years) without some intervention from me.

    Like I said in Silverblue stuff mostly works nicely:

    • Bottles running from Flatpak is running games in Battle.net without problems
    • Minecraft is running from the launcher installed from Flatpak
    • Roblox is running using Sober from Flatpak

    I think we may have installed steam natively using rpm-ostree. I think we ran into some sort of issue running Overwatch, and I quickly opted for the native steam package to get things working instead of trying to fix the issue using Flatseal. But I don't remember what that issue was so I can't say the Flatpack steam won't just work for you. Maybe it was very slow Vulkan shader processing?

    My kid likes Minecraft mods so he needed java in his path to run installer jars. AFAICT in immutable distros the options for setting up CLI programs are either to run a different distro with native packages in a container (distrobox), or drop to rpm-ostree. I opted for the latter.

    On the hardware side I think one of the biggest factors in building a snappy system is choice of SSD. Like you said, spinning metal is out. But the idea that SSDs are all equal is a common misconception. The thing to do nowadays is to use an M.2 form factor which is where you get a little board that goes into a slot directly on the motherboard, sort of like a small, sideways RAM stick. That plugs directly into the PCIe bus which gives it tremendous bandwidth. Drives that support newer PCIe versions can be faster due to having access to more bandwidth, but the design of the drive itself is also a constraint.

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