Top 6 Linux Distributions for Children (Ages 2 and Up)

To warm up children to use Linux, we start with selecting a distribution suitable for their age, which they feel comfortable with and which they can start exploring immediately without feeling any barriers. We will look at a couple of distributions suitable for children in the article and will give some brief information about each one.

Qimo for Kids is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with a desktop environment designed specifically for children. The distribution comes preinstalled with educational games suitable for children 3 years and older. The distribution comes with an intuitive and very easy interface with large icons so that even the youngest children will not have any difficulty playing with it.

Note: Qimo 2.0 was released at the end of May 2010.

Sugar is the distribution based on Fedora Linux that was designed for Prof. Nicolas Negroponte's One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) project. It is aimed at K-6 children and is a radical departure from the traditional desktop, putting more fun, ease, teaching and programming abilities into the computing desktop. There are two cons that I see. The first one that it is designed for classroom use. Secondly, it is so radically different from the traditional Linux desktop that you can begin to feel you are using a completely different operating system.

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Note: Edubuntu 10.04 was released at the end of April, 2010.

LinuxKidX is meant for children between ages 2 to 15 and uses KDE as the default desktop environment. It is a slackware based distribution featuring KStars (a virtual planetarium), Kalzium (Periodic Table of Elements), KTouch (typing tutor), KGeography, KWordQuiz, ChildsPlay and many other child-oriented programs. The project is supported by the creator alone, not seeming to get enough community support. I suggest you install it on a virtual machine or a separate partition or just run from a live CD before giving it a permanent installation to see if you’re comfortable with it. If you do not want to bother, it would be better to try another distribution.

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Doudou Linux is currently very young, but the passion of the contributors, especially from France and Russia, signals a future very strong child friendly Linux distribution. (There is an extensive review of Doudou Linux already in my hubfolio.)

As Paul Barry puts wonderfully in his Linux for Kids Experiment article in Linux Journal, there is no point in asking “is Linux ready for kids”; instead the question is “why not use Linux for kids.” I completely agree with his point, and say Linux is the system to go for the children. There are distributions and programs for every age and parents should not have any problems managing their kids’ computing experience.

I suggest all parents introduce their children to the Linux operating system; not because it is my personal operating system, but rather to introduce their young, unspoiled brains to freedom, openness and the ability to explore found in open source.