I installed gcompris for my 5 year old. FOSS childrens educational software and games from KDE.

I also bought her a cheap, pink, 65% keyboard and mouse set that make it “her computer”.

There’s also a few free resources to teach typing once your kid can read and write enough to understand what they’re typing. I’ve heard good things about Typing.com and typingclub.com but we’re not ready to start typing yet so I haven’t used them.

Also, if my kids ask a question that’s a little tricky to explain I’ll show them how I use a computer (or phone) to look for answers. One of the few practical applications I’ve ever found for AI is “can you explain [abstract concept] in a way that a 5 year old can understand”. This isn’t explicitly teaching computer skills, but showing them a practical use case and how to dig into their curiosity.

Best option for most IMO is a Tineco refurb with a 2 year warranty. You can occasionally get them for like $75 on sale on eBay, or like $100 normally.

I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone who loves their ISP since the early days of transitioning from 56K modems.

I don’t think they come in “buy it for life” varieties.

The closest thing would be a wet/dry shop vac. They won’t apply soapy water to the floor you’ll have to do that separately, but they start around $50, there are a million attachments for different applications, and they will last for ages.

For casual domestic use with a good life span I recommend Tineco. They’re a little bit on the expensive side but they go on sale all the time. Cordless convenience decent battery life, “self-cleaning” functions.

The Rose Anvil did a really good tear down on a pair of doc martens. The consensus in this thread already makes a clear case but this is pretty informative.

https://youtu.be/DOVPuA4qZ68

Okay this is officially getting too goddamn pedantic for me. I will trust that you’re correct on all this.

That’s not an attack on ffmpeg. It’s 1,000% not fud. I’m not disputing its libre bonifides. H265 is not libre. It’s also not part of the ffmpeg code. But they can be distributed together because it’s non-commercial.

My apologies if I worded something in a way that wasn’t clear about that.

Separate from that issue.

There are distros that do not want to incorporate any non-libre elements into their OS for ideological reasons. They won’t have h265.

Then there are distros that have commercial elements, or for which their parent company has some kind of commercial interest in the distribution. If they don’t want to pay for licensing they may have legal limitations on their ability to incorporate h265.

But any completely non-commercial software that wants to bundle h265 in has cart blanche to do so.

I hope that clears things up.

H.265 is royalty free for non-commercial use. It’s ownership is kind of complicated with a bunch of patents and it is commercial licensing is controlled by a few groups.

If I understand correctly (and I’m no lawyer) FFMPEG is completely non-commercial so they don’t have an issue. Although I think anyone using FFMPEG for commercial applications (streamers, professional productions, etc…) should be paying a license.

I guess some distros felt that was legally murky for them and others aren’t comfortable with non-libre software.

I really wish Fedora would figure out a legal workaround and bundle in the codecs, but for now I just have to remember to set it up before I add any media.

H.265 is a pretty major one. E-AC-3 for audio. Ideally, for a desktop user, you want to be able to play anything. So you need know if your distro includes those codecs. Then how to install them if it doesn’t. Then you need to delete your thumbnail cache to fix the thumbnails.

It’s not hard. You just have to know that that’s a task you need to do. Coming from windows, a user is likely to just assume linux doesn’t support video properly and it’s thumbnails are broken.

Little quality of life stuff.

• How to install video codecs
• How to get thumbnails working in the file manager.
• Adding cloud storage to the file manager.
• How to make libre office save files with MS office filetypes by default (depending on work / school requirements)
• Maybe samba shares if they have another computer in the house.

For truly casual users (grandma or a student taking notes) there isn’t a lot to learn. Here’s your browser, here’s your office apps, this is like “notepad”. This is the software center for updates or any other applications, press the “windows key” to get your menu.

Came here to say drive letters. That’s a weird one for converts. A guide for noobies should explain that drive is mounted somewhere in the file structure. Cover how to find it, and how to mount it where you want.