The game dev environment they’re talking about is MakeCode Arcade. I’m also a big fan of it. There are a number of little handheld gadgets that you can use with MakeCode—scroll down on the homepage and there’s a section that shows them all: https://arcade.makecode.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

I recently installed Ubuntu on a little Geekom mini PC for my 6 and 8 year olds to share. So far my 6 yo isn’t too into it, but her older sister mostly uses it for the games I’ve put onto it through Epic and Steam and programming using MakeCode, mostly for Arcade (https://arcade.makecode.com) (I have a couple of micro:bit-based handheld shields) and more recently getting into the awesomely simple networking that... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

Alternatively, get her an emulator of an old 8 or 16 bit system, I started coding at the age of 10 in these systems, with books that were oriented for kids. https://www.atariarchives.org/ http://redparsley.blogspot.com/2016/08/input-magazine-retrospective.html https://archive.org/details/input-hi-01 Or if you prefer something more up to date, https://arcade.makecode.com/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

Https://arcade.makecode.com/ Is great fun to use and made for kids. The forum (forum.makecode.com) is well moderated and safe too. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

I'm not sure how this reduces the barrier to game developement. There are already lots of free assets and game engines designed for making arcade games that are a lot easier then say Unity or Unreal. Like https://arcade.makecode.com/ or https://microstudio.dev/ or https://scratch.mit.edu/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

Distrosea is good place to start if youre not sure what you want yet. It runs full distros online and you only need a browser to connect to them. Its a quick way to get a feel for which desktop would suit you best https://distrosea.com. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago

You might look at ZorinOS or Linux Mint. Mint is very easy to use, I was able to get my elderly mother to use it. It has a software store and built in automatic backups. Zorin has some built in features to support Windows software pretty easily I understand, but I'm not sure if that's through wine or a VM or what. You can test them out in your browser thru the website below and see if it fits what you're looking... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

Https://distrosea.com/ There's also quite a few good reviews on Zorin on YouTube. People should also note Zorin sells a "pro" version for around $50. I'm sure most people could achieve the same features the pro edition has without much trouble, but it also helps them with development costs and everything else. https://zorin.com/os/pro/ https://zorin.com/os/pro/. - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago