No Windows!
26 Dec
There was just no way I was going to get my step daughter a Windows netbook for Christmas. No way, no how. I couldn’t find a good way to articulate why, and so for a couple weeks I was just responding, “No Windows!” to my wife’s questions. I hadn’t expected it to be controversial but I did eventually have to explain myself.
Even after disregarding all of the security issues and the lame attempts at fixing administrative access, it was mainly an issue of freedom. Windows is proprietary and I was determined that her first computer would be more educational than a dumb terminal for homework.
I got my validation yesterday. Not more than an hour after she’d ripped off the gift wrap and screamed in delight, she was showing off a drawing in a program that I’d never seen before. I’ve been using Linux for ten years and she’d already managed to show me something new. She’d found it all on her own. (It sure wasn’t me. The only time I’d been allowed to touch the netbook was to type the wireless password.)
Kids learn quickly. They’re simply better able to pick up new computer interfaces and learn how to use them, long before most adults.
All kinds of Free
Adults hate new things. I don’t know what my success ratio would be trying to switch somebody to Linux or Firefox or OpenOffice or whatever, and I really don’t want to know. It’d be too depressing. There’s no way to count the number of times I’ve seen superior software pushed aside for something more familiar, even if that meant putting up with crashes and viruses or spending hundreds of dollars.
After a long enough time, better software can begin to make headway but, man, it takes such a long time. The few times I’ve really been successful switching somebody they were either young, who will pickup anything quickly, or to adults who’ve had some previous exposure to other operating systems. Usually that means they used something else when they were young.
Actually, when I first picked up Linux, the thought ringing in my head was, “This is just like DOS! Except it doesn’t suck!” Far from the horror stories of actually having to type commands (gasp!), I felt immediately at home. That’s because the old clunker I’d grown up with had run DOS. It didn’t matter how vastly different it really was, it mattered that I felt comfortable and wanted to learn more.
While I’m sure she will have to use Windows frequently in school and work, I hope that a dose of Linux now will help her be more open to new things her whole life.
Practical things
Her main complaint so far is the netbook is unable to play Windows games. Fathers will be all too familiar with the Disney channel and probably Wizards 101. But I doubt the little thing even has the power to run that game. Anyway, she’s not too heartbroken over it.
After all, she’s already found the Disney site where she can watch videos without torturing the rest of us.
Still, people will sputter, “She’ll have to use Windows at work!” They’ll cross their arms and lean back as if working is the most important thing anybody will ever do.
Well, maybe she will. But she won’t have to deal with that for probably another ten years. What OS she’ll use then is completely unknowable. Even if it’s Windows, it’s unlikely to be what we have today. And just like I have to learn where they heck they put the network properties in every new Windows release, she will always need to learn new things.
Besides, she uses plenty of Windows at school and her Grandma’s house. She already knows Windows plenty well enough.
So far the netbook as been a resounding success.
I can’t imagine what drawing program she found. No way she whipped up a picture it and did not spend hours on tutorials. Gnu paint is complete garbage. There’s really not much else out there.
oops, that first sentence is about Gimp
@Mark – there are tons of free drawing programs that don’t suck. Two of them are Inkscape and Xara Xtreme, both open source.
Mike, you didn’t say your stepdaughter’s age, but I’m guessing from the Disney reference that she is pre-teen. I’m not surprised at her comfort with Linux, though. My granddaughter has so much fun with my Dell Ubuntu netbook that she is getting her own for her 7th birthday this week.
Heh, yeah she’s 11 and all about the Disney channel. :-)
Actually, the laptop was a pink Dell Mini. I left that out because I didn’t want to distract from the rest of it by getting into hardware.
I’ve been impressed with it though. We got the SD drive for a little more durability. It’s got a nice, sturdy feel to it and a surprisingly comfortable keyboard (considering).
I have to laugh at comments xxxx is completely garbage. on what basis, why? It is a completely unsupported statement.
I got my wife to start using Linux instead of the virus breeder aka Windows 5 Years ago. All I did was install linux and told her that I had enough of viruses and crashes. it wasn’t an easy shift for me at that time but I am happy that i did. my wife had less problems with the transition than I did since I was the one responsible for the tecnincal side of things and she just enjoyed the results ;)
I bought my brother a laptop earlier this year and i did the same. I knew that he would spend the whole time playing games if he had a Windows machine without learning anything at all so I installed Linux and told him right away that the laptop wasn’t for games. He also found a few things that I was totally unaware of even after using Linux for so many years.
All that it really takes is a little courage to throw Windows in the trash.
Maybe she’ll have to use Windows at work, maybe it’ll be something completely different by that point. If she grows up with a variety of OSes, she’ll be comfortable moving between them. If she thinks computers = windows, she’ll be at a terrible disadvantage if she ever applies to work at a Mac or Linux shop.
Excellent article! I bought my wife a new Dell laptop for Christmas and loaded it with PCLinuxOS (we’ve both been using Linux for years) and Windows XP in VirtualBox. She just loves it.
You’ve also given your daughter a great educational lesson that gives her an advantage over her peers. I wish more parents took that kind of interest in their child’s development.
Thanks for sharing.
I agree with James that variety teaches flexibility. Our generation – that grew with DOS, that were used to edit config.sys, manage memory, edit HEX savegame files – are much more likely to learn how to control the machine through the shell than the GUI post-W95 generation.
It’s easier to make the transition from CLI to GUI than the opposite. Even though it disturbes me a lot when I know exactly what I want the machine to do and can’t find the damn button.
My solution chez moi was Edubuntu for the child, Debian for my wife and Slack to me.
@Mike – So which distro is running on the new netbook?
Ubuntu pre-installed by Dell.
Well I had the misfortune that my sister-in-law had Santa give the Acer net-book with Windows 7 Starter. Well what a piece of junk, you are not even allowed to edit the wallpaper. They are coming over today to have me set them up on a wireless network and do some software installs, such as adding OpenOffice, VLC, GIMP, and open source Virus detection software. I am adding these things because the sent system has no software or time limited and limited ability software (ie 60 day trial of a watered down version of WORD). I am going to ask if they will allow me to install Linux on one of the systems so that they may do a side by side comparison. They are usually naive about the rights they have and the fear that if they do something other then what M$ wants they they will lose any and all service from Acer and M$.
It’s like languages: children learn languages easily, and if a child learns several languages before the age of about 7, all of them stay with the child right through adulthood. Same with OSs, which are, after all, the form of language we use to communicate with a machine.
I did pretty much the same thing for my 5yr old. I bought a pink, MSI Wind U100 on Ebay and tested some distros out on it. I ended up with my usual openSuse. Since princesses don’t appreciate green lizards I modified all the backgrounds and splash screens to something appropriately pink.
With a 160G hard drive it has more than enough space for anything imaginable. I put a few dozen CDs in ogg format on it. I gave her ogm videos of a thirty movies she has and about a hundred dhort cartoons.
For the past few days since Christmas it’s the number one topic with her when a relative calls on the phone. It’s a REAL computer!
She also plays a lot with the Tuberling paint program, and Frozen Bubble. I left the entire OpenOffice.org suite installed for when she’s a little older (though it starts up with a pink splash now that says “Princess Office”.)
MyPaint has a very natural feel to it. It is definitely the favorite in my house.
That looks cool. I’ll have to install that for her. Thanks!
You can try wine for the games she cannot play natively. However, check the system requirements of the game. If the Mini cannot handle the minimal/recommended specifications from a hardware standpoint, that is not a knock against Linux or any other OS. It is merely a fact of life with a netbook. I was surprised to find that some of the dinky games that are out and about now REQUIRE DirectX 9, which the intel 500 and 950 integrated graphics just do not do well, even under Windows XP.
Yeah, I don’t think it’d be able to run it even if she had Windows. It says it needs 5g disk space and I don’t think it even has that…
But Wine might work on one of our desktops:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=13531&iTestingId=30485
WINE might surprise you. I got one of the lower spec Acer Aspire One’s about 15 months ago (it has 512mb RAM). I installed WINE and Lotus Notes on it. Now, given that Notes has a reputation as being slow and cumbersome on windows.. it was actually running faster on my AA1 than on my Windows Vista laptop.
I liked the form factor of the AA1, but when my 17″ powerbook started to die, I decided I would try and run linux on the cheapest laptop with a large screen I could find. I installed Mandriva on it (as I wanted to use my Windows Mobile phone as the internet connection). Again, it’s been a very impressive experience.
We’ve come a long way in a decade. I leave the Mandriva DVD in my laptop all the time. It’s just amazing to be able to pull up the package manager and choose from lots of really great software that’s free (in every sense of the word).
Give WINE a try, at least on your desktops. You might find there is an odd tweak required. And unfortunately, I can’t recommend Crossover. Every time I’ve tried to run Lotus Notes under Crossover it hasn’t worked. But in vanilla WINE it’s a champ.
Thanks for the article. Being a father of two boys, I agree that they will pick up and learn anything you put in front of them. Giving them an open and free operating system is probably the best thing you can do. Yes, it is different than the standard norm. But… diversity is good. Personally, in my family we only use Linux. I use Wine and if we need anything that MUST be in an Windoze environment, VirtualBox works every time. The downside is computer games as you mentioned. I’ve had a hard time getting all of their games working in Wine. In fact, only a few work in Wine. However, I will be trying VirtualBox soon which has Direct3D support now. VirtualBox is an awesome piece of software.
I look forward to seeing Linux continue to grow in households in the upcoming years. Thanks!
1) Drawing program for kids: Tuxpaint
2) By learning more than one OS, she willlearn the underlying concepts rather than memorizing button position. She will be better off in the long run.
I have two kids, 5 and 7. They use both Linux and Windows machines, but prefer the Linux machines because they don’t lose their work on Linux if they forget to save and leave it with an app running and unsaved data (usually a picture or a game) while they eat lunch or go out to ride their bikes.
Ah, that’s the one! It was Tuxpaint.
Great article :) I’m glad to see parents introducing Linux to their children before Windows. Perhaps we can look forward to a day without desktop Windows at all :)
You should keep us updated on how it’s going with her e.g., any troubles she’s run into over the months and how you overcame them.
Two years ago, I set up a few Latin American immigrant families on Kubuntu GNU/Linux. They naturally had been “accustomed” to MS Windows. Well, their high-school-age daughters took to Kubuntu like bees to honey. They’re all over Facebook, YouTube, etc. The adults seem to be fine with it also. They like that they don’t have to worry about “los virus”, and they love that they can switch between Spanish and English on the fly if they want.
My tech support “burden” has been virtually non-existent during all this time. I might’ve visited each family’s home a couple of times.
–TP
I’ve been using Linux (Fedora) for years, but finally managed to swap out the dismally slow XP out on my wife’s laptop about 3 months ago. Since then, she’s come to love it, and wants more speed, so Puppy Linux went on and livened up an old celeron laptop into something wonderfully useful. Then, my 8 year old daughter, who took to Linux like a duck to water, asked me to dump XP on her desktop, because the ‘games are better in Linux, dad’ (frozen bubble!!). I gave her a Linux Mint CD… she installed it herself, only asking me a few questions along the way.
Here’s to a Windows free home!
Pretty much going to repeat the comments stated earlier on here, I have 5 kids – ranging from 9 years to 20 months and whilst the youngest isn’t using computers (yet!) the others are all quite comfortable navigating around on the ubuntu PC they have in their room. It was Windows XP originally but that must have been about 4 releases ago now!
Can’t say I’ve noticed any problems with them and even my wife is picking up some CLI so she can kill non-responsive apps and even how to restart GDM after one particular bug we found ;-)
I’ve also converted both my parents onto Ubuntu and they both seem quite happy.
You’re lucky Mark, I’ve tried so hard to teach my folks how to use Ubuntu, but they are very resistant. Even after I showed’em that Linux is faster, safer, more stable and have all the software they need, they just don’t want to learn the slash address paradigm. It’s worst to me because – like Bobby said – the virus breeder turns my holiday visits in support-the-malformed-OS-visits.
PS: Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP – 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company that can’t stand 1 bit of competition.
I just bought a pink laptop from ZaReason for my wife’s birthday to replace her old windows XP laptop. As I really wanted it to make a good impression I sponsored Francois from http://www.bisigi-project.org/ to create a gnome theme to match the laptop and to add a personal touch to the gift. The theme is called Ellanna http://www.bisigi-project.org/?p=209&lang=en. She just loves it and is having no problems at all doing everything she wants to do on it. I have since switched her friends laptop over to Ubuntu 9.10 as well. Her laptop was infected by some facebook focussed virus and as she had seen my wifes laptop was keen to give Ubuntu a try so the virus infection was the final straw.
Another vote for not worrying about confusing “the kids” – my tween picks up whatever device is nearest and has no problem switching between windows/ubuntu/apple/mobile devices with equal facility.
It’s going to be interesting when this generation joins the job market…
Definitely interesting. I think it’ll be nice for developers though. No more begging/tricking/pleading with people to get them to switch from this or that product. No more IE6! :-)