March 24, 2026 - 07:35 UTC

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What about a laptop?
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Im saving my old gaming pc for when it's time to introduce my son to computers. It will be set up in the living room.
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I just built my 7yo daughter a gaming pc with my 10600 and mb/ram along with an $80 2060 from market place. Plays everything she wants just fine.
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Come to think of it, that big push for usage of iPads all throughout schools (and thus being the computing experience many kids would get acquainted to first) was really insidious wasn't it?
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thankfully apple just released the ipad as a vanity netbook. seems planned.
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nah man i was stuck with only an ipad for several months and was inches from jailbreaking the thing. tablet is fake computer
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Access to one of the faculty computers at my primary school introduced me to shoot-em-ups so can confirm.
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It's the ability to alter and edit the machine. That's the difference. iPads/phones are ready made experiences with almost 0 meaningful control. Desktop OS meanwhile give a level of control that can be empowering. If you gave the same level of control to a phone/iPad OS you'd get better results.
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"Here's your first phone! It's a rooted Android running a custom OS. Good luck! I've sent you links to the relevant XDA, Reddit, and Git communities."
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God, Going On The Computer used to /mean/ something.
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@earational.bsky.social 🐎
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You can make a desktop "yours" in a way you can't do with a phone. Sure, you can customize stuff on a phone, but only in superficial ways. You can't ruin a phone in a special way that's yours and yours alone.
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MS-DOS came with QBasic. You could create your own games as soon as you reached the prompt.
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a pixel phone with a grapheneOS or perhaps a clever "rooted but bootloader locked" alternative if you feel like living in the fast lane is also ensouled and can act as a desktop if you give it a usb typec 32 inch monitor
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"That's it, ol girl. Play some early 2000s industrial on winamp while I chill."
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Arch linux is like if the horse was made out of glass
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Arch Linux is the computing equivalent of Agnes Tachyon.
It could outrun everyone else... four times.
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we used to respect the computer, it used to have its own space in the home and its own shrine dedicated specifically to it and to nothing else
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This. Desktop/General Purpose computers have the machine spirit.
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The ultimate gaming machines…and anything else you need to do…
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No because they need to pretend to be Star Trek doctors
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This is truth, but everyone should at least once, get to use a computer bigger than they are. VAX 11/780s running Unix are ideal. They're the Belgian draft horse of computing.
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Software good app bad
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i suppose there is something to ve said about the "frontier" nature of experiencing a PC, before Operating Systems became so anti-modular and full of obfuscation.
I learned many problem solving skills just from operating many different kinds of PCs
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as someone who's been on PCs, laptops and has an iPad it truly feels like the strangest of the devices. I do love mine but I would never hand one to a child
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my parents put an already-outdated machine with Windows 95 in my room when I was like 8 and all I did was watch the lawnmower screen saver for hours. wish I could say I started programming it or something but lol
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My kids are grown but they'd access to my PC as soon as they could sit at it. Both could read fluently before starting school, and had impressive typing speeds by age 8. Eldest got banned from one of those games as they thought she was cheating 🤣 Both can now build and maintain, one uses Linux.
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My step kids got one this winter from their dad. I've tried to get them interested, but it's Windows 11 so it's actively bucking that, and the only thing they regularly play is Oregon Trail, which my stepdaughter insists she can play without reading. She CAN read, she just insists; it doesn't work.
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Ok but I do a LOT of illustrations on my iPad
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Let the kids start with Windows 98
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This is what my parents did to me, giving me an offline Windows XP computer when I was a toddler/preschool kid
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All kids should have a mandatory 10-hours a week in front of one of these from ages 8-18. Absolutely life altering experiences.
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We used to respect the computer and build shrines to it. We've made computering far too casual
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Love those two incoming mobile phone call detectors 😉
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And there's the speakers. xD
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Wouldn't work. Those games are too complex for average kids.
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Yes, this is where my eternal unquellable hatred of The Printer began...
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AI image I'm pretty sure fwiw
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And at least half that time should be spent in roller coaster tycoon so the photo is accurate 😁
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I can hear the IDE drives screaming away from here!
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Reckon it should probably be HOMM II on the screen, tho
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Is that roller coaster tycoon I see on the screen there? 🧐
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Internet access should be slow enough to cause images to load in chunks and it should cause arguments when it ties up the phone line.
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YEAR OF THE HORSE
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does this mean that a mac is a nervous horse that wears a soulless mask
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I feel like if you want to teach someone that computers are tools and need to be treated with that level of respect, a desktop's the way to go. Pull it open, show them the insides, emphasize that it's a complicated piece of electronics.
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Make sure that whatever OS is on it has a reasonable dose of user-fixable jankiness and opportunity to fiddle, too!
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Laptops stole your desk. Tablets stole your chair. Smartphones stole your AFK. It’s as simple as that.
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