Teacher here.

My favourite “lesson” I ever gave was in a grade 9 technology class. It was a pretty small class, about 10 kids. I split them up into two teams and made a competition. They chose their own teams — it ended up being boys vs girls. I never would have made it that way on my own but that’s how it worked out.

The school had a bunch of old, decommissioned PCs that were headed to the junk yard. I sorted through all of them to get two exact sets of working parts for the competition.

The goal of the competition was to recover a jpeg from one of the hard drives. Each team had a computer with the ram removed and two hard drives. One was blank and the other had the jpeg on it. They also had a Linux Mint installer on a usb stick.

I don’t remember exactly how I had set it up but it was points based, something about getting to different stages first. Like 5 points to be the team that turns the computer on first. One of the big ones was that they got an extra 10 points if they did the whole thing without a mouse.

I told the other classes about the competition and asked some other teachers if it would be okay for them to watch and cheer on. It ended up being the nerdiest and most exciting class ever. Students were literally cheering each team through a Linux install. One team got stuck and had to pull out the mouse. There was booing. It was so epic.

The girls won, being the first to recover the jpeg and they did it all without a mouse. It was so awesome. The jpeg was the meme about how would a dog wear pants.

It was about 5 years ago, my first year teaching. I really miss those days. I only teach math now, and while I like that, there was something magical about showing kids how fun computers can be.

I just started them on Linux machines from the get go. The same reason I got good at 3.1/95/98 was to setup games, filesharing, and getting hardware to work for better games. Even with Steam, there’s always some work to handle oddities. The kids are rapidly becoming reasonable basic admins the same way I did. Whether they decide to go further and learn more will be up to them.

A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That’s what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.

I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same “drive mappings” to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.

I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I’ve written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their … issues but both work pretty well.

Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.

G-compris is great for kids. Both of my kids have only ever used Linux or Chrome OS.

My father was lucky, I wanted a minecraft server so bad that I accepted to learn how to handle an Ubuntu Server, with ~10 years.
Then I kinda had my edgy hacking phase with 12, and installed Kali as dual boot.
As my Windows install got older, dirtier and buggier, I decided to just f it and installed Pop over everything.

So, get them to be interested in having/doing something requiring Linux, then show them the wonders of the Linux desktop, preferably not Kali, but something more user friendly, and finally wait till they want to reinstall for whatever reason, like a new PC (with AMD or Intel GPU).

A friend of mine got his son to use Linux by just not providing an alternative, he installed Debian edu (don’t know if that’s the name, but basically a Debian spin for kids with parental restrictions and stuff) on an old laptop for him and that’s what he used. Once he got his own PC it was over though since he wanted to play Fortnite so bad that he bought windows for that. He still dual boots Fedora, but I don’t think he has used it since the windows partition is there.

I think the thing is you can’t really get kids (or people in general for that matter) into Linux the way you are probably into it and interested in it. At least not if they’re not already interested in it on their own. They will learn how to use it sure, but not the way we’re used to using Linux, understanding the intricacies of the system, keeping the system safe,… They’ll probably find a way to do what they already do on windows and ignore that the OS is different.

For reference about 4 year olds: https://lifehacker.com/i-raised-my-kids-on-the-command-line-and-they-love-it-5974087

I think I read his blog back then. Telling about the progress his (then) very young son made. How he didn’t install a graphical user interface at first but the kid loved ‘sl’ (the steam locomotive if you mistype ‘ls’), and cowsay and so on. And they had a command-line chat to communicate (or just smash buttons).

Awesome question. And good advice here. To add something: Don’t just give them games. Hook up an old printer, install LibreOffice plus the openclipart images. Kids can make everything into a game. We used to play with my dad’s old pc and imagined being private investigators and had our own little office. We printed out lots of silly stuff and took notes on the computer. There are a few ‘learn typing on a keyboard’ games, but back then I didn’t have fun with them.

Maybe they like drawing, install TuxPaint, Krita. Or video editing or recording stuff, give them a webcam/phone and Kdenlive. Have them do a spoof on a movie or do their own Lego stop-motion film. Or they like to make music, install Audacity’s sucessor, LMMS, a drum sequencer …

And of course the whole kids-education metapackage if your distribution has one. So they can program little turtles and start coding with Python. You can do this at age 8, depending on the kids personality.

It works best if it’s tied somehow into their lives. For example (occasionally) printing homework assignments, a stop-motion suite if they play a lot with Lego anyways…

Other than that, my boy scout education tells me to “look at the boy”. Have them explore and see that they like. Assist and teach them how to operate the software they want to use. Help them once they get stuck or can’t figure something out on their own. You will have to guide them and show how they can achieve the results they want, so they stay motivated.

Give them background knowledge and tell them the 'why’s. Why something is the way it is. I’d say that is the point where we get to Linux. At age 10 or so, you don’t necessarily care about an operating system. But you’re curious and happy to learn why there are different ones and why they behave differently and the story behind that. And the thing that hooks you is the possibilities and usefulness for your life. So that’s why I recommend installing lots of useful (to kids) software.

And maybe give them a chat / instant-messenger program. So they can contact you and ask questions.

As it is with teaching generally, it heavily depends on how you do it. Kids are very curious by default. In my experience: “Look at the boy” has served me well. Kids come in a wide variety. Don’t teach them top-down but find a mix of letting them explore and roam, but also make sure to teach them the basics first. And guide them how to apply things to their life and find use-cases and the fun in it. If you pay attention to them, you can adjust your own behaviour.

Give a kid the arch install wiki and a computer with the USB iso ready to go. Tell them they aren’t allowed food until they install it and run neofetch.