squaresinger

Austria.

Don't start with the tinkering aspect first.

Ask yourself, why does your kid use Windows?

Probably to play games, access the internet and maybe do their homework. Most probably, they don't use Windows because they specifically enjoy working with Windows, but because it easily lets them do whatever they actually want to do on a PC.

Spending 5h on fixing some weird incompatibility between the Nvidia GPU, your DE and Proton might be fun for some, but it's most probably not what your kid wants to do when they could be gaming or doing whatever they actually want to do. Problems like that can scare them off quickly.

So first setup the PC so that everything they usually do on Windows works without issues.

The next question is, why would your kid want to run Linux instead of Windows?

The usual advantages (FOSS, free to use, better for developers) don't really matter to most kids. The only things I can think of right now are:

• Runs on PCs that aren't Win11 compatible
• Some games like Minecraft run faster (but some games also run slower)

With the setup completed and advantages thought of, you can let the kid use Linux quite similarly to Windows. When the kid wants new software or has an issue, work together with them to get everything running. First do everything and let them watch, later let them do more and more of the process.

That's basically it.

Is that so different than in previous generations? Even back in the C64 era most kids just played games from disks they bought.

If you got into computers any time from the mid-90s, you would have been using Windows and that's it.

Smartphones always came with their predetermined OS without a command line or programming tools on them. (There where apps for that on many systems, but in general, that wasn't a thing most users used.)

From the 80s on, programming wasn't required to use a PC and most users never learned it.

In general, people would just use pre-made software, because they use a PC/smartphone as a tool to do what they want to.

It's kinda like with any other tools. People buy a hammer because they need to get a nail into a wall. Only very few people are interested in a hammer itself and get into the art of making their own tools.

That's why the prisons here all offer free education and job training. You can also do an university degree for free while in there. (It's free when you aren't in prison too.)

The article mentions tablets with resistive touch.

Is that really a thing? I thought, Android only supported capacitative touch.

Resistive touch would mean no multitouch and thus no two-finger gestures.

Probably that was before Samsung offered 5 years of updates. And if the tablet was a bit outdated, it would have easily been outside of the software EOL date.

That's why you should always go for phones/tablets that have been released this year and not take an outdated one. Not for the specs, but for the software support duration.

Over here there is a food discounter that also has a tiny electronics corner, where they have "great" deals. You can often get phones and tablets for less than half of the MSRP. The issue is, that all of them are either out of software support or close to it. A while ago they sold a cheap iPhone that had one month of software support left. And on iPhone, most apps only run on the currently newest iOS version. So a month after buying that iPhone, the user would lose access to most of their apps.

I tried a full switch to Vivaldi, but desktop Vivaldi was quite buggy for me, so now I'm running split: FF on Desktop, Vivaldi on Android.

And crop some of the unnecessary landscape so that the actual subject of the image is easier to see on small devices. Also, blur the license plate.

I don't get the downvotes.

Sure, many (or probably most) people have no use for a tablet-friendly UI and a tab bar.

But for those people who do, this is a very important point. I actually switched over to Vivaldi, due to the lack of a tab bar in FF.

If they'd implement that, I would be able to go back to FF.

So I don't really understand why someone would be opposed to a toggle-able feature that you don't have to use. If you don't like it, don't enable it.

Then there are a lot of people who don't know what PCBs are.

Instructions unclear. I now have strawberry jam in my magazine.

Yay, another step to getting to feature parity with Firefox 68!

Now give me a tabs that I can also use in phone mode and keyboard shortcuts!

I mean, it's only been 3 years since new FF on Android cut all the good bits from FF68 and before.