Linux

Personal opinion, I don't understand why more parents haven't moved to use Pi-Holes for content blocking. Since you can tailor your own blocklists, it's not impossible to do, and I'm pretty sure some enterprising folks have already made a Pi-Hole block list for porn and various adult websites.

Further, if your child figures out how to bypass the block, they're learning valuable skills, if nothing else.

To be fair, it seems like you're more concerned with overall screen time, and I don't have a better solution for that than you already have.

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.

Try ActivityWatch! Releases page here. There is even an AppImage.

Then also install: aw-watcher-web to track duration on sites (eg. firefox).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

What are you looking to do? I personally would look into more generic management tools. You definitely want to setup blocks for any questionable content and you should be monitoring everything. I would create them an account and then lock it down so that there ability to break things is limited. You can either use Gnome or Xfce4. They both support restrictions. To my knowledge KDE does not focus on restrictions at all.

To start I would setup a Firewall on your family network and then lock down what sites are available. You can block things like adult content and any other things like social media. You say you don't want her sitting and watching YouTube all day so you could just only allow YouTube at certain times a day. You could then tie her phone into a VPN that goes back to the home network. On the phone you can also use https://timelimit.io/

For Android there is TimeLimit.io which is open spurce and in the F-Droid store.

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.