My niece, same age. no problems so far

I installed linux mint xfce on an old laptop for her.

we set it up together and she loves it. Themes icons and all that jazz.

I have hidden and removed items from the start menu. Just to keep it simple.

I also set up some aliases so she just has to open a terminal and type “update”. she loves that. Thinks she’s a hacker now and impresses her friends.

I have set up an alias to call bleachbit, so she just types “cleanup” in the terminal, types her password, and she can watch bleachbit do its thing. I explained to her how important it is to keep her machine clean, like housework at home.

I must say, Kids are a nighmare for attracting viruses and malware using windows, its not the best age to suddenly be thrust into the slop of the internet.

They are young and excitable and will click on anything and everything that catches their attention without giving it a second thought.

Its a big plus not worrying about viruses and malware on linux.

To stop her having free reign and accidentally seeing porn on the internet and protect her from the worst crap, I installed Mullvads DNS on linux and in the librewolf browser.

Mullvad have a fabulous family dns filter; https://family.dns.mullvad.net/dns-query

here are the options:

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

I have set the search engine to Startpage

I have also taken advantage of Ublock origin and added loads of these is the: my filters list

just a few of many to stop access to certain websites from the search pane

This one stops amazon links appearing in the startpage search

startpage.##.g:has(a[href=“.amazon.”])

startpage.##a[href=“.amazon.”]:upward(1)

This one stops ebay links appearing in the startpage search

startpage.##.g:has(a[href=“ebay.”])

startpage.##a[href=“.ebay.”]:upward(1)

I spent more time on this than anthing else;