Comment by eptcyka

> We shun most of this as faddish and low quality.

This is almost word for word the same way my parents talked about Harry Potter and Pokemon when I was feeling alienated in school for only being allowed to read religious books for entertainment.

It leads to some pretty strong resentment, if that's the kind of thing you care about.

>We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. Fortnite and Battlefield are replaced with OpenMW and Veloran.

My parents didn't let me read Song of Ice and Fire Harry Potter (and do a lot of other contemporary culture things) when I was younger because they said they are pop culture fad. Only haute culture literature in this household! I've had a good childhood but I also missed out on a lot of good things because parenting decisions like this.

And Fortnite is actually an awesome game, it's the mugen we were all dreaming for.

At the time it was a GTA title. Regardless, the Linux alternatives are useless, there is no alternative to the socially agreed upon phenomena, the child can either participate pr they cannot. The exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing, but you end up having the child swim upstream a bit.

> If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point. The value is in understanding and leveraging that understanding to achieve your goals.

I don’t know about that. Just to be upfront: I’m not advocating putting your kids through this because I think they have to have that motivation for themselves to really benefit.

However, I basically did blindly follow guides to try and get things working without fully understanding what I was doing. Over time, things stick and I’m able to look under the surface and get a better understanding and better solve the problem I’m facing.

Hell, any “Learn X Language” book works like this! There’s always boilerplate that you need to kinda skip over for a while just so you can get a running program. Hell, I’m leaning Rust and I’m using #[] “decorators” and I couldn’t tell you exactly what they’re doing!

> If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point

I digress. Everyone has to start somewhere and not everything has to have a point in the start

When I started using linux, I got so fascinated by open source software that I would just search for software/software types and searched open source alternative to X and go to alternativeto or others and try it out etc.

I used to copy paste dnf commands in the start and I still remember that phase.

I think I learnt linux from myself and have given challenges along the way and I feel like there are things that I have still done blindly along the way (building linux isos)

But the fact was that I still felt proud that I was atleast able to replicate the commands and able to have some familiarity with the process. I feel like if I wanted to able to know more about xorriso and cpio to a deeper degree to understand what wizard magic commands I was running to building custom linux iso s etc.

Now I don't know about fortnite etc., I am a kid but surprisingly games don't interest me that much, I am way more in my movies / tv shows (just ended dexter s8) right now.

There is some alienated feelings when people online my age mention the games they play but I think that games on linux are genuinely great support from what I know and my pc doesn't have anything beyond integrated gpu so yeah

my cousins didn't want me to play much games and so they didn't buy a good gpu during the pc and I think they did succeed in this.

Its complicated to how I feel the situation or even let alone think how I would even try to approach this situation if or when I become a parent myself. Honestly, parenting can be a bit hard but I still don't know if you should shun something that you think is faddish or low quality partially because I think that the best thing you could do (imo) is educate them on the positives on linux and how they might outweigh the benefits of fortnite in the short to long term in a fun manner.

Its um complicated and there is definitely a feeling inside me on that i do some incredibly niche things which would be so complicated to explain to someone my age in my proximity. I think there is only one or two of my friends who actually know even 1% of the stuff that I do in linux (one of them had installed hyprland because of me haha)

I’m sure you also give out raisins and sugar free mints at Halloween too.

Just curious how did you persuade them? From what I see kids usually want to play whatever other kids play, like TikTok or Roblox or Fortnite.

The point isn’t to play the best “non-faddish” games. It’s to play what’s in the zeitgeist and form bonds with people their own age.

I’m so glad my parents didn’t override my decisions on literature or video games or TV shows. I watched anime then, my parents didn’t get it, and that’s perfectly fine. I continue to enjoy it now. If they had made me adopt their mindset of “anime = fad” or “anime = cartoon = childish” I’d have been worse off. Instead of enjoying masterpieces like Frieren I’d be snobbishly thinking about what a fad it is.

This comment is epically pretentious, but I agree that kids shouldn’t be playing online games designed as skinner boxes to increase playtime and financial spend. Makes kids miss out because everyone is playing them? Eh, too bad. They gotta wait for their late teens, imho.

Agreed. My kids (8 and 11) both have Linux on desktops in the living room. They work really well for what they want now, but someday we might have to make different choices.

That's a good point. My oldest has root on his own System76 laptop, and he's quite accomplished at administering it. But he is able to play and beat Elden Ring in Dark Souls, which would not have been an option five years ago in terms of compatibility.

I really appreciate you taking the time to write this up! Your experience is excellent, and it sounds like you're approaching it with good judgment and curiosity! Linux is a ton of fun, because it's a toolbox you can, as you say, "do whatever your heart wants". Much of computing has lost that ethos, and I think it's a real step backwards.

One of my favorite computer scientists, Alan Perlis, wrote the dedication for a very famous computer science textbook that used to be used to teach students at MIT. The book is sometimes called "The Wizard Book", but it's real name is "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". The dedication said this:

> This book is dedicated, in respect and admiration, to the spirit that lives in the computer.

> I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

I think your journey is a great example of that spirit!