Things are scary right now (2025), Donald Trump has repeatedly stated a desire to gut the Federal Department of Education, leaving us with whatever can be provided on a state by state basis. But, instead of sitting around and seeing whats going to happen to our kids education, my wife and I both decided that getting a couple of laptops we can use as teaching aids isn’t the worlds worst idea right now.
So here is how I’m turning a couple of used Thinkpads into a sort of “Home Computer Lab” in the vein of 1980s-1990s school computer labs.
The Hardware
I settled on a couple of Thinkpad X390’s for my kids. I chose these for a few reasons;
- they are in the $200 USD range right now, so we could swing them with our tax return.
- They have similar specs to my T490s, which is an i7 with 16gb of ram, so I already knew they’d run most of the games, software, and emulators I wanted to use.
- They have a touchscreen, which my daughters are already used to using.
- They are a good size for small kids at 13 inches, but still have a keyboard big enough for an adult to use if needed.
- The Thinkpad line is very well supported by Fedora KDE, which is what I intended to use.
Where has all the Edutainment Gone…
One thing that struck me right off is how little modern software there is for education. Folks my age didn’t know it, but we were riding the tail end of an edutainment golden age, that wasn’t to last. Professor Hartman on youtube put out a video which covered the high points, but the gist is that a dude from Shark Tank bought The Learning Company, and then MECC and Broderbund. He then gutted the company, taking down the entire edutainment industry with it in yet another cycle of private equity roll ups and bust outs. What recovery has occurred has taken the form of web based “Software as a Service” products like ABCYA! and ABCMouse. Conventional “Edutainment” software isn’t really a thing anymore, what niche there is is taken over by Minecraft and Roblox. Roblox is a nogo, and even though we are playing lots of Minecraft together, its educational value is largely limited to gaming and Minecraft itself.
Its OK though, I’m a retro gamer, so running the same old titles I grew up with isn’t really a problem. To this end we installed DOSBOX Staging, Wine, WineGUI, and Windows 3.11 running on DOSBOX Staging. I’ll likely be writing some subsequent posts about setting up and using DOSBOX Staging. We also setup kids accounts on Steam so we can share games, so the girls have access to kid friendly titles on there through the Proton Compatibility layer.
I know, I know, if your running so many Windows applications why don’t you just use Windows? Lots of reasons. First off, I just prefer Linux, I’ve been a Linux user since like 98 or 99, Mandrake Linux Represent! Windows 11 isn’t any easier to use, for someone completely new to computers, than KDE plasma. In order to run many of the older titles I’m interested in I’d be running dosbox and ScummVM anyway. We like mods, and we hate micro-transactions so Minecraft Java is fine with us, and it runs on lots of things. Also Fedora KDE 42 doesn’t have ads in the bloody start menu, or an AI reading my daughters diary.
So what are you working on right now?
We’ve got a MineCraft Java realm for the family, and my 5 year old has a thriving chicken coup. the girls are both using ABC Mouse for a few hours a week, and reading through some of the old Living Books series on ScummVM. Both girls now know how to launch software from a dos command prompt. They’ve both also been working on their CVC words (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) with the help of the old Reader Rabbit games, as well as spending some time on the Jumpstart Kindergarden and Jumpstart Second Grade games. So far so good. I’m hoping to start allowing more monitored access to resources on the internet soon, but they both need to work on their reading more for that.
Also, all three of us have these cheap Hamster 2.4ghz mice from Amazon, something I bought initially for myself after seeing one on Action Retro.