Hi, I switched my desktop to Linux full time many months ago and I’m never going back. My kids want gaming PCs for Minecraft, Roblox, fortnight, etc. Kid games for now.
Hardware
I’ve been planning to show my kids how to build their own computers, and I think I can 2 for 1 this. My current PC is a prebuilt Ibuypower, and the last computer I assembled had an AGP slot. I know spinning metal is out generally. Other than picking an AMD graphics card what tips can you offer me?
Software
I want to give them the opportunity to learn and fail, so I don’t think I would go with an immutable distro. Thoughts? Assuming a separate /home I think having to reinstall once in a while is a good lesson.
Firefox with full add blocking of course.
Is there an application for managing screen time, and while they’re still little I’d be interested in some kind of blocking/filtering.
Thanks folks!
Minecraft works, Roblox works, Fortnite… Doesn’t work because epic refuses, otherwise it runs fine for 5 minutes
IDK about using waydroid for Fortnite, but yeah
Does Roblox work now? It used to, but Roblox changed something so that it didn’t, but I didn’t think anyone had got it working again.
EDIT: Sorry, I saw the other reply after I posted
Fortnite will not be avalaible,
But there is plenty games avalaible on steam for Linux, a lot of Indies but well made.
And BTW, they can be soft brained so its really good for kids.
There is also itch.io where you can find some ore.But I hope they don’t play fortnite to be with friends because it will be tough for you to convince.
Fortnight is only once in a while, I don’t think it’s a big deal. I think I should install a Windows VM if it becomes an issue.
It won’t run in a VM.
Thank you.
I am under the impression that Roblox is not compatible with Linux due to anti cheat. I went Linux mint and installed the Linux versions of the top have stores. Steam provides compatibility for many games due to the Steam deck. No issues noted for Minecraft. Haven’t played Fortnite on Linux, but it’s available from the Epic launcher.
Roblox on Linux has gone through some phases of working and not working. Currently it does work using Sober https://sober.vinegarhq.org/
I haven’t tried Fortnite, but from what I’ve read I think that is a no-go.
I will add a Windows VM or something if necessary, but I want to discourage its use.
So far most of my games have run fine in steam/proton or lutris. It’s really impressive how far that stuff has gotten!
Some games can detect if they are running a VM and block that as part of their anticheat. You may not be able to get roblox or fortnite running in a windows VM.
Some games just flat out require actual Windows, so your options are “Have an actual Windows drive/partition” or “Just don’t play those games”
Noted, thank you.
You can run Roblox on Linux with Sober. My son is a big fan! https://sober.vinegarhq.org/
I set my kid up with Silverblue recently. After seeing it in use for a bit, as a power user I think it’s got some obnoxious compromises, and NixOS is a much better way to get the same benefits, and encourages safe experimentation at every level of the system. But for a beginner-friendly system that is very stable I think ostree distros like Silverblue make sense. Mostly stuff works fine, but you want to break out rpm-ostree occasionally to get a native package.
I have another kid on Fedora as a control. So far things are fine. Previously I had both kids on Manjaro, but they weren’t able to keep up with upgrades long-term (over the course of a few years) without some intervention from me.
Like I said in Silverblue stuff mostly works nicely:
- Bottles running from Flatpak is running games in Battle.net without problems
- Minecraft is running from the launcher installed from Flatpak
- Roblox is running using Sober from Flatpak
I think we may have installed steam natively using rpm-ostree. I think we ran into some sort of issue running Overwatch, and I quickly opted for the native steam package to get things working instead of trying to fix the issue using Flatseal. But I don’t remember what that issue was so I can’t say the Flatpack steam won’t just work for you. Maybe it was very slow Vulkan shader processing?
My kid likes Minecraft mods so he needed
javain his path to run installer jars. AFAICT in immutable distros the options for setting up CLI programs are either to run a different distro with native packages in a container (distrobox), or drop to rpm-ostree. I opted for the latter.On the hardware side I think one of the biggest factors in building a snappy system is choice of SSD. Like you said, spinning metal is out. But the idea that SSDs are all equal is a common misconception. The thing to do nowadays is to use an M.2 form factor which is where you get a little board that goes into a slot directly on the motherboard, sort of like a small, sideways RAM stick. That plugs directly into the PCIe bus which gives it tremendous bandwidth. Drives that support newer PCIe versions can be faster due to having access to more bandwidth, but the design of the drive itself is also a constraint.
I appreciate the details, thank you. Flatpacks have worked pretty well for me so far.
I’ve definitely seen some Vulkan shaders take ages, I assumed that was normal. I’ll look into it!
Idk if kids are a target group of Nobara Linux, but I heard that’s good for gaming.
Rest sound good. Don’t forget to give them lots of productivity tools… OBS, Kdenlive, LMMS so they can practice shooting videos, create music… They’d need LibreOffice, maybe an IDE to learn coding, or something to create a website. As a kid I had a lot of fun tinkering with the Free Software tools, next to gaming.
Test the website blocking, if you restrict for example porn. Nowadays the browsers all try to do some privacy enhanced DNS over HTTP and that might circumvent the default DNS. I’m not up to date with the current solutions to restrict usage… Maybe someone can chip in, I’m pretty sure that’s available.
Thanks for chiming in, I appreciate it.
