this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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I think kids find ways to play and tinker with stuff. I'd give them an office suite to practice writing letters or advertisements or whatever they come up with, something to draw... maybe not Gimp because that's not easy to use... I've seen people give their kids an instant messenger which connects to their dad/mom so they're incentivised to type something. And then of course we have games. From Supertux, PlanetPenguin Racer, Tuxkart to commercial games. There are some kids games in the repos. Kartoffelknülch, drawing programs. Programming languages to learn coding with puzzle pieces and blocks or animate Turtles. There are educational games, at least my local library has some and I played some as a kid. But maybe at least try to balance the gaming. There's so much more interesting stuff in computers. And then of course you could put some content into some directories, I think unrestricted internet access isn't great at 6yo and the computer will be empty without, so idk. Maybe put some templates there, ideas what to draw, music or audiobooks or whatever fits the purpose...
@hendrik@palaver.p3x.de you really have some solid and realistic ideas. Do you know of any game that's free, which gives the kid typing practice and also help them to master the mouse ??
Gcompris is great and you can find in Gnome Software manager.
Uh good question. Seems people recommend Tipp10 and it's in the repositories. Looks like for way older people, though. I remember playing Tux Typing that's more colorful with words falling down. Idk. I hated these programs as a kid. 10 finger typing is a boring and tedious task. But I'm not sure about the didactics of it. My knowledge on when you should learn proper typing is a bit outdated. Maybe not yet at that age. Just give them some motivation to type something (anything)? So they start trying and understand how the keyboard is useful?
With the mouse... Well I just picked that up on my own. We played PuttPutt and Monkey Island 2. And obviously playing point and click adventures is going to give you the needed skills fast. Though you really need to be able to read for that and that might take 2 years of school? Most of the computer isn't accessible without being able to read. You can draw, though. Or play games with speech output. (And non-educational games like racing games or whatever works without language)
And by the way, I had another look at it and some people curate educational games for Linux:
and I remember Debian has some metapackages with education software as well.