My wife is still on Mac OSX, but my son has embraced Mint. I’m a bit cheesed off that there aren’t (obviously) many kid friendly programming tutorial resources, other than maybe getting a sub to codeacademy. Other than that, all good.

That puzzled me too.

Thoroughly enjoyed this post thanks. I have long wished for a FOSS OS that can truly become popular by considering these users and carving a mainstream path for them. Even - for people who don’t even know what terminal/shell is and don’t care.

Whatever they’re watching, it’s fucking funny.

Tiktok afterwards please.

This is an exceptional write up, thanks!

I started with Mint and it was very simple to set up. I don’t really like the DE though (personal preference, I’ve used OSX for over 10 years). From your description it sounds like I can change Cinnamon to something else - is this fairly straightforward to do?

I’m looking to use the machine as a photo processing platform (from film and digital) and finding alternatives to Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop… with a view to ultimately having a NAS and cloud backup once I get to it.

Apologies for doubt. That’s absolutely bizarre.

Doubt. Which sites?

This is equal parts informative and hilarious. Ticketmaster sucks.

Linux Musk Cinnamon. Yours for a modest subscription.

This stinks of panic MVP.

He currently really likes locally copying people’s games from Scratch and modifying them in funny ways which he calls ‘hacking’ lol. He’s having fun so I’m happy for him to do what he likes so long as it’s age appropriate.

Your Mac has “recovery mode” in the firmware, it will often boot into recovery automatically if there’s something wrong with your boot disk

Oh really? Agh I just assumed incorrectly then. Thanks.

Thanks for the ‘more realistic’ intro to dev. I will be showing him CLI. And I think these are good steps. First though I want to give him the opportunity to learn the ‘thinking/design/problem-solving’ element of programming.

Great suggestions. I’m tempted to get a Chat GPT sub myself.

Hah yes we try and ‘balance’ it all. He’s a voracious reader, loves his rugby and we try and get out of the house as much as possible when it’s not continuously raining, thanks Britain.

Amazing thanks so much. Yes, structured ‘play’ might be just what he’s after. He can then tinker in an IDE - I did wonder if anyone had built one for kids specifically.

I can teach him a bit of CLI / Shell and I’m ok if he bricks the computer, hence the choice of OS. Super easy for me to nuke and start again.

I’ll be checking these out.

Mint Cinnamon was very straightforward for (a not very technical) me on a 2016 MacBook Air v7! Dual boot was a tiny bit trickier, but it’s given an old machine a new lease of life. Highly recommend.

Seriously why now.

How would you reflow the solder?

With an iron? Or a heat gun? What would be the best approach for something like this with lots of tiny surface mounts?