Well, don't help him. People(me) grew up without the Internet or Smartphones and broke Windows on the family PC all the time. In 2000 when I got SuSE it only slowed down the breakdowns. He can always fix stuff himself by reinstalling the OS. As long as he doesn't format the /home partition he will not lose data. And he will learn his lessons.

12-year-old me installed Linux on an old desktop tower and I also broke things constantly. The difference is my parents were both humanities majors and I knew full well there was no point in asking them for help. Even at the time, the resources were all there for me to teach myself to Linux. Sure, I spent many many hours troubleshooting things instead of doing whatever it was I had as my end goal, but I was a kid—learning is the point!

It's harder as a parent to know that you're capable of solving their problem and still say no, but by age 12 that's pretty much your primary job: to find more and more things that they can start doing for themselves, express your confidence in them, and let them figure out how to adult bit by bit. Breaking a Linux install and fixing it again is among the lowest stakes ways that dynamic will play out from here on.

> Ubuntu

Well, there’s your problem ;-)

This is great, though, really. I broke our computer so many times growing up, I couldn’t possibly count. I don’t think I ever lost anything of import, other than some savegames of mine. I keep telling people who ask, “how do I learn Linux?” that they need to use it, tinker with it, break it, and fix it, ideally without anything other than man pages and distro docs. It is a shockingly effective way to learn how things work.

There is more to learn / do than anyone has time. My kid is supposed to spend an hour on his violin, half an hour an fitness, then some time on chess, then eat - including clean up and/or cook. somehow he needs to fit some free play in too. He doesn't have time for more.

It isn't that he could do that, but what else to give up?

I think for a lot of us that learned linux this way, it was firmly in the "fun time" category. We would have rather been tinkering than most other things.

I'd say that screen capture probably works under X11 no matter what your graphic card is. However this kind of confirm your general feeling: there is no only one blessed and enforced way to do things so everything can break because of combinations.

Examples (I've been on desktop Linux since 2009): shutdown actually reboots except for a few months with some lucky combination of kernel and nvidia driver. The brightness control keys didn't work for at least half of the years. They currently work. All of that has workarounds but I understand that some people legitimately fold and go using another OS.

> i3 session

Oh he'll figure it out eventually. This kid might be going places.

I've wasted like 8 hours in the last two days trying to upgrade windows 10 to 11 so my motherboards wifi drivers can be installed.

It just worked in Linux. I don't get where this comes from, because every time I hit a problem in Linux, there's a solution.

In windows, you get a vague hex error code that leads you to a support page where the error could be caused by one of a dozen reasons.

And on top of that, MS is constantly hostile to any user who just wants a basic OS to use their computer with.

So couple of issues there. Never upgrade windows. Fresh install only. Never had a good day upgrading it.

Secondly, there isn't always a solution in Linux. I've got one now where something is utterly broken and it's 5 layers of maintainers down and no one gives a shit.

Windows 11 has begun making it a lot harder to install with local logins. They just disabled the typical method for enabling local only.

I want to upgrade in order to retain that local account.

Install LTSC: https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

Then use massgrave hwid activator.

My experience is the opposite. Epgot a hold of a bunch of floppies in 1991. Dual booted so I could play Diablo. Some time around '98/99 got tired of dual booting.

Steam getting proton was a godsend, all those years of games became playable so now I have a huge back catalog.

> Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.

Not a bad idea. This is exactly what I do on my daily driver.

Meanwhile people who actually get stuff done all use linux :D

That sounds amazing, well not for you but for your kid :) It has been very valuable for me that I messed around windows and linux as a kid