My brother is 12 and just like other people of his age he can’t use a computer properly because he is only familiar with mobile devices and dumbed-down computers
I recently dual-booted Fedora KDE and Windows 10 on his laptop. Showed him Discovery and told him, “This is the app store. Everything you’ll ever need is here, and if you can’t find something just tell me and I’ll add it there”. I also set up bottles telling him “Your non-steam games are here”. He installed Steam and other apps himself
I guess he is a better Linux user than Linus Sebastian since he installed Steam without breaking his OS…
The tech support questions and stuff like “Can you install this for me?” or “Is this a virus?” dropped to zero. He only asks me things like “What was the name of PowerPoint for Linux” once in a while
After a week I have hardly ever seen my brother use Windows. He says Fedora is “like iOS” and he absolutely loved it
I use Arch and he keeps telling me “Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”. He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
My kids have been gaming all day on Steam. They have zero intellectual curiosity about the system they are using. They have been using Arch for years but it might as well be a console or Mac. They log in and launch a web browser, Steam or a Minecraft launcher and that is it. It makes me a bit sad.
You have to give them a reason to get interested in the OS and the programs they’re using. I gave Linux a try because I was concerned about privacy and I wanted to use more ethical and user respecting OS and software than what I used at that time. Linux and the FOSS world was an obvious choice for me. Custom ROM on Android was sort of the bridge which allowed me to transition. If it wasn’t for that, I would still be on Windows and I wouldn’t learn that much on how an operating system works and what differentiate them, aside from the look. The fact they’re kids or that they play games have nothing to do with it: a lot of adults don’t know either what type of OS they’re using, despite it being in their best interest. The problem is that we don’t give or show them the reason they should be interested, or at least be curious about it and most of time, before people get a degree, we end up killing their curiosity.
As they play Minecraft, you can advise them to switch to Prism Launcher instead of the minecraft launcher, especially if they mod the game, it’s much better for that. It could be a good start.
The fact that they’re gaming on it means they’ll know how to use it later
When I was that age I didn’t think much about the system I was using, it doesn’t really appeal to kids but they’ll still be learning
To be fair, my curiosity for the system when I was a kid came from having a win98 computer without internet or any games installed, other than some freemium CDs and a neo-geo emulator.
I’d spend time just going through the menus, and I had no idea how anything worked, but it was interesting just seeing what was there. Also I spoke no English at all, so many things were out of my reach/understanding.
If I had Steam and Minecraft? I wouldn’t have explored the OS so much. Probably. That stemmed out of boredom as much as from curiosity.
You generally have to have problems you need to fix to be interested in the guts of the thing. Projects like starting their own self hosted Minecraft servers would encourage that.
Just add Arduino and its ide, scratch, cura, tinkercad and a 3d printer. You can change their habits easily
Do you do the updates or do they do it through terminal? My sibling running Ubuntu is fine with it because it’s easy and the update is a button.
I fully manage our machines as they are a resource shared by the whole family and used for work, study and play. We do have old machines, electronics, home server, arduino etc available for tinkering if they are interested and there is a lot that can be done in user space if they were interested so I don’t know that they are missing out.
It is possible to do arch updates from a gui but arch occasionally requires manual interventions. These are normally documented through arch announce and easily searchable if an update breaks some functionality but intervention usually requires the console and I am fine with that. In my experience debian and variants do offer a simpler update experience since you are usually only applying security updates within your current release. If they were on a stable Debian based distro I would probably setup unattended automatic security updates. Arch is more like a refined Debian Sid.