Hi all,
I’m getting a pc for my daughter. I’ll install Fedora KDE Spin. I’m looking for a parental control solution that also integrates with her Android phone. I’m currently using Google’s Family Link which while not great it offers enough. I’d be happy to move to any other solution that can count both device’s usage screen time as one so she doesn’t use up her phone and then move to the PC.
Any cool recommendations?
Parental controls are one of the under developed parts of Linux, the only major one I know of is timekpr
// sry for offtop but
Is everyone is fine with parental control nowadays? It was for paranoid parents only in my childhood and I didn’t know anyone with parental control really.
The worst thing to me and my friends was hidden power supply cable if you did something really wrong.
My daughter has ADHD and if we don’t limit her screen time she can literally spend the whole day sitting and watching Minecraft videos, and then later she gets very grumpy, so yeah while I absolutely hate having to do it, it’s more for her own health than content exposure (not blocking websites and app installation other than by age recommendation).
I wonder if maybe some kind of notification system for her, and you, would be useful (in addition to blocking).
Then maybe you can interrupt her, perhaps talk about it, or setup some tools for her to use to help manage stuff and learn along the way.
Guess what I’m going for is the learning/growth angle, rather than just automatic constraints (which hy themselves don’t teach or help us learn to manage this stuff ourselves).
Seems like there’s a need for all this for all kids, not just neuro-atypical.
Oh, sorry, that sounds totally understandable - I wish my best to both you and her!
And don’t see anything wrong with that either way - was just interested how common it is
Seems like this topic got lots of attention over night, I really appreciate it!
It looks like there’s really no solution for what I’m looking for, even if I’d move to windows I don’t think I’d get what I want. Apparently only Apple has that but I’m not sure, never owned an apple device.
Seems like this would be a cool project to work on, cross platform cross device parental control with Linux as a first class citizen.
There are various tools (2-3 of them) but they’re all different ones and don’t work with eachother. Usually, a parent needs an easy to use panel to set screentimes, blocked sites, and which apps are allowed or not (and possibly a checkbox to allow the games subcategory every weekend). But all these tools, while exist, are separate and difficult to either install or make work properly.
I recently did a bug report at Linux Mint to create such an admin panel. While this was a feature request, I presented it as a bug, arguing that because of Mint’s unique position as a “home” or “first” distro to new users, its absence is more like a bug. To my surprise, the creator of Mint, while not replying anything additionally, he assigned it a bug status, as if he agreed with the argument. So we might see something like it on Mint, but not for a couple of years yet… By that time you might not need it anymore, but I believe it’ll come eventually to Linux too.
For phone, a couple things.
Look for Mobile Device Management. I’ve been meaning to do this for family for years.
Flyve is an open source MDM. I’ve only tested it so far. You may want to look around for others.
To help with file management on Android, I setup sync jobs between the phone and a desktop (or a user’s laptop) for certain folders, things like DCIM, Download, Movies, Pictures, etc (and certain app data folders such as Camscanner) using Syncthing-Fork on the phone, and Syncthing or SyncTrayzor on a pc. Doing this enables file management from the pc, as changes can sync back to the phone (and since I want my photos on my pc anyway…). Syncthing can work across most any network, including the internet and your phone data plan (so don’t let it sync big stuff using data). It can be locked with a password too, to prevent little hands from mucking things up.
You could, in theory, just let it sync the entire sdcard, but lots of stuff changes all the time, such as app data in the Android folder. No reason to sync that stuff. Plus doing that doesn’t permit finer control of sync for things like DCIM, which I permit to sync over any network and any power state.
Syncthing also works between two or more phones, or PCs (windows or Linux), and has lots of flexibility for sync. I use it extensively to share stuff with friends so we don’t have to think about sharing, especially for larger files. I sync files between phones with no PC, some sync jobs use a pc as intermediary so both phones don’t need to be connected all the time, etc.
Another sync tool, Resilio, is really good. But on the phone it’s a major memory and battery hog, so I use it only for it’s selective Sync feature, and keep it turned off otherwise.
These are just my ideas, everyone’s use-case is different. Your problem is one I’ve been lazily working on for years, so I look forward to the other ideas that come up here.
I haven’t researched this (I don’t have kids), but out of curiosity, what type of mobile device is your daughter using? Also, I think PiHole is a solid recommendation like others recommend.
Otherwise, from a quick Google, I don’t know of anything that can integrate both Linux PC and mobile phone screen time. Honestly, this sounds like a fun project I could implement someday if I ever had the will. However, for right now, in terms of screen time all I can think of is reading system logs (perhaps via SSH) to manually analyze your daughter’s screen time.
She’s using a Samsung android phone with Family Link, it’s meh but does it’s job. I’m looking into limiting screen time more than content restrictions, and having the total screen time across all devices in a centralised service is very much what I’m looking for.
There’s some free dns servers which block certain stuff (pretty sure adguard has them, other products are available) which can be set on the router and/or the device itself. This is not very flexible but it’s easy to set up.
