I introduced my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to startx and xmonad (2012)
I&#x27;m going to get flak for this but I&#x27;ll say it anyway: tiling window managers are awful and broken, everybody who uses them on Linux knows it and either doesn&#x27;t want to admit it or knows it and doesn&#x27;t care. I get why they are appealing to programmers, it&#x27;s alluring to think that you can use a desktop without ever taking your hands off the keyboard, and it&#x27;s fun to write little scripts to control things. But honestly, everything that can be done with a tiling window manager can be done better with other tools. Yes, they are that broken. They get used because they&#x27;re a fun little tool for programmers to play with and break and waste time, and not because they have any practical purpose. There are plenty of better computing skills to teach children than this.<p>And before someone accuses me of being a KDE fanboy or GNOME fanboy or something, I used tiling window managers for many years. I&#x27;ve spent countless hours playing around with them and hacking on them. It was a frustrating experience the whole way through and when I look back at the whole thing there was really nothing positive about it. I&#x27;m completely serious here, I don&#x27;t think I would have made this comment back when the article was written but that&#x27;s all I can say after 9 years of messing around with it. I suppose they are great if you want to introduce your child early on to the classic experience of Linux where everything is controlled entirely through arcane and badly document config files and keyboard shortcuts, and lots of things just randomly don&#x27;t work. If you are a person who works on these things or wants to teach them to children, in my opinion your time would be better spent elsewhere.