[marak830]

Wonderful writing. As someone who is in exactly the same boat (as I assume a lot of us here are), being called on for family tech support for around 30 years now, I too am starting to reconsider recommending windows.

My son is getting to the age where is taking an interest in computers(not just games) so I think I will be starting him off on a linux box.

[hyperman1]

Seconded. My 9 year old son has in his life worked with Android and Debian at home, and iPad at school. There is 1 game I could not get to run under wine (beltmatic), but apart from that everything works. I was a bit scared about his school stuff (from Die Keure) but it just does its thing. He recently installed Planet crafter, a game I had never heard of or checked out, and it was a non event. Lego, basic programming, ...

He went to a friend, doing networked minecraft on friends windows laptop. Son then took our laptop as he did not like Windows, and I think he accidentally convinced that whole family to migrate to KDE on Debian, just by showing them how reliably boring it is. I was smiling at that one, to be honest.