Comment by em-bee
2 days ago
without root, how can they mess up the system?
at worst they can mess up their account. then set up a new one. i don't see a situation where you would need to reinstall remotely.
don't let them choose distros. use the same distro you have, or one that you are comfortable supporting. everything else will make it harder for you to help them.
Well, they can mess up the filesystem, eg corrupting it via shenanigans with the power, or nuke their home directory, config, etc. Enough that the next boot doesn't just work and get them back to where they were. Uncommon, but very possible.
Re the distro, I think that you should aim to minimize the "irrelevant" cognitive load on the kid and make them feel ownership of their environment. So yeah, I would rather learn how to help them do things in Zorin knowing that they chose it because they liked the colors than ram stock Ubuntu or god forbid Arch down their throat because it's what I or their parent ran. There'll be plenty of time for that once you know they are into it. And no harm done if they aren't.
sure, if you run something that is aimed at experienced users like arch then that's probably not a wise choice. but for example as a fedora desktop user i'd recommend something fedora based, because it will drastically reduce the troubleshooting efforts compared to something debian based.