How Linux Helped Me Avoid Spending Money on a School Chromebook
Quoting: How Linux Helped Me Avoid Spending Money on a School Chromebook —
I didn't just want to run any distribtution (distro) of Linux. Some are better suited for children than others. While Ubuntu is feasible, anything Arch-based probably won't go over well.
My choice hinged on two things: stability and desktop environment.
I wanted to run GNOME as the desktop environment. My kids both got their start on old eBay laptops running GNOME, and this desktop environment was intuitive enough for both. While GNOME may feel foreign to anyone who cut their teeth on old Windows 98 machines, it is easy to learn for the same reason most people are able to pick up and navigate a smartphone.
I went with Fedora Silverblue. GNOME is the default desktop environment, and Silverblue is harder to break than traditional Linux distros. As an immutable OS, you can't break Silverblue by doing something as simple as killing power during an update or halfway through an app install—the kind of things kids are prone to do. The ability to roll back to previous versions is also a nice safety net in case something does go sideways following an update.