[xiaomai]

I run a group chat for my family. I recently switched my server from running plain Prosody to Snikket. People with phones use the Snikket android app, but my kids that are too young for phones join in with Dino. Dino is a really nice client. Snikket is pretty good as a phone client... I think maybe there is a way to get push notifications working through the standard Android infrastructure which would be an improvement, but I haven't done that yet.

I guess the functionality isn't better (let's be honest, it's probably worse) than the proprietary alternatives, but for now the family is happy with it and I feel good about the extra privacy / lack of advertising / etc.

Really appreciate all the people that put in the work to make this possible. Great work Dino team.

[toastercat]

> but my kids that are too young for phones join in with Dino

Curious about this, since it seems to imply your kids use Linux desktops. How has that worked out?

[xiaomai]

Honestly, it's been pretty great. In general it's not something we think about much? Internet/chatting with friends/video games all just work (in terms of video games, they're mostly doing minecraft or pico-8 games... we try not to do _too_ much gaming anyway, but anything else they're doing is probably on the nintendo switch).

My daughter recently has started to do more artwork on the computer (she's using a Wacom tablet with Krita). I don't know much about that world. Maybe there are way better tools and she'll want to switch to one of those in the future? (Is that an ipad? some Adobe software?). I figure as they get older and develop their own opinions we can revisit what types of computers/software they use, but for now things are going good.

[darknavi]

I've never thought about having kids run a linux box, but as a non-linux daily driver I think it'd be quite interesting.

Looking back on my youth I think I'd be concerned with my kids installing bloatware, malware, etc. I feel like that whole genre of software would be much more challenging to install, which leaves me at two outcomes:

1) They don't install bloatware/malware. Excellent! 2) They figure out how to install bloatware/malware. Still pretty great as that means they are learning their environment.

I think being technically literate with your daily driver computer is crucial to daily success, so either way I think kids would do fine.

[hkt]

I can second this: my darling offspring has a raspberry pi and thrives on it - he has never used OSX or Windows. Just Android (on a tablet) and Raspbian.

[JeremyNT]

Not the OP, but I gave my daughter a Linux laptop as her computer running Arch Linux. I guess she got it at around age 7 (she's 10 now).

No issues with it. The (IMO, kind of sad) reality is that almost everything she needs to interact with is either web or cross-platform electron. The only real exception here is Zoom, which has a native linux client. She doesn't really need to understand much detail to use the machine.

She used GNOME before she ever saw Windows. We switched school systems and now she has a Windows laptop at school and her Linux laptop here, which she switches back and forth between without any trouble.

The only usability quirk is the LUKS FDE decryption phase, where she has to enter in her password before the system starts. There's no GUI and bad feedback on when she's typing, so it's confusing. But she understands what to do now and usually has no trouble (you might be surprised at how flexible kids are).