Ask HN: Good Starting OS for Children?

7 kqr 11 7/25/2025, 7:52:30 AM

My oldest child is now reading without incommensurable effort, and this is the time I imagined I would introduce computers to my children.

I have in my mind the idea that I start them off from an offline barebones command-line interface, and then we gradually learn file management and maybe other things in that environment while it is still shiny. At some point the child is familiar enough with the computer that we install X or Wayland or whatever it may be. This is mainly in order to start them off in a fairly safe environment until they have shown they are able to handle more.

The questions I have are:

(1) Is this a good idea? I'm aware they'll probably run into Windows as soon as they enter elementary school, but I'm not too concerned they'd fall behind their peers.

(2) Which OS would be a good fit? I had my sights set on NetBSD at first, but then I learned its non-graphical interface does not support Unicode, which is probably a dealbreaker since our native language uses non-ASCII characters.[1]

I'm still leaning toward a BSD because it would be more of a complete, stand-alone operating system than a Linux distribution, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

[1]: Not that I'm planning to localise the OS, but I suspect we'd start off creating files with little messages in our own language.

Comments (11)

al_borland · 7h ago

If it doesn’t feel like fun the kid probably won’t want to spend much time on it.

If you want to start with the CLI, you’ll need a way to make that seem fun and engaging, with a path forward to make it even better. Without any prior knowledge or the internet, that isn’t something they will be able to do on their own. And managing files isn’t that interesting.

kqr · 22h ago

I have tried to reason back and forth about (1) myself. The things I think we'd lack are (a) simple graphical games to show what is hypothetically possible in an engaging way, and (b) something like PICO-8 which they have already shown an interest in.

Re. (2) is seems that no BSD supports unicode console, but an ISO-8859 variant might be sufficient: https://web.archive.org/web/20170223012445/http://v3.sk/~lku...

Desafinado · 16h ago

How old is your kid? I don't see why they'd have much interest in a command line interface or have any need to learn how to use one that young.

Install Linux Mint, download GCompris. It'll teach your kid how to learn the mouse and keyboard in a minimally stimulating way.

muzani · 3h ago

Kids at 5 love writing. My kids used to do it just for the keyboard emoji that pops up, then they'd get obsessed with writing things like "dog" or "red car" in Google image search.

kqr · 10h ago

Five and a half. He has already learned the mouse by drawing, and keyboard by playing a little with a text-to-speech system on my machine.

I believe the interest is there even for a command-line interface.

ferguess_k · 13h ago

I want to experiment DOS loaded with some games, so my son will need to use dir, mkdir and etc. I think it's easy for a small kid and we will see.

kqr · 10h ago

I wanted to avoid DOS because the CLI knowledge earned there is not as transferable to a Unix system (which would be more practically useful in the future), but you're right in that it comes with some benefits too.

throwaway915 · 21h ago

Your child is still far from forming any concrete understanding of the world.

Play is far more important than conforming to definitions of mimetype for things that are all the same or following someone's arbitary rules for where to put collections of names that mean nothing.

Try NoBSB: Go for walks in the forest or outside, play games, have conversations.

kqr · 21h ago

Rest assured we do all of the above also.

At least my oldest very clearly needs intellectual stimulation and likes forming mental models of how technical systems work. I think he'd really enjoy figuring out CLI interactions and simple scripting.

brudgers · 9h ago

There is no reliable data and therefore no objective criteria for ranking OS’s. So no best OS, just arbitrary opinions (like approximately all parenting advice that does not fall within a set of established norms defining a cultural identity).

I doubt command line would be most peoples’ first thought, but if that’s your best idea it’s about as good as anything else…this is not a critical decision and there are no technical mistakes in any meaningful sense. Good luck.

paulcole · 6h ago

iPadOS would be a good place to start. Most kids will like iPads.

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