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?
// 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.
It's not really random internet strangers' place to judge someone's parenting choices. We don't know their overall parenting style, the personality of the child, what lessons they may be trying to teach, etc. The only thing we know for certain is that they want to use parental controls, perhaps to ensure they stay safe as they learn how to use the internet responsibly while also having a level of autonomy.
That's not helicopter parenting, that's just prudent.
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).
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'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.
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.
if you want a paid version similar to pihole with a bit more control and insights I recommend a smart DNS service like Control D.
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.
For Android there is TimeLimit.io which is open spurce and in the F-Droid store.
Create a new user and give explicit permissions via doas + SELinux (corporate style lockdown). And deal with network policies with a DNS filter on your LAN (or maybe run an unbound service on her device with a different user without a login so she can't change the config). Easy
For Android, use a FOSS MDM
