Good_Slate

my daughter has stolen a few things. She's 7 now but it started when she was 6. It was from school a few times - at first it was seen as a mistake and for her to return at item.

She was always told "it's the school's" or "person X will be sad if doesn't have y back".

Recently however she took some chewing gum from a shop. When I saw it I took her back to the shop, we gave it back and she apologised to the shopkeeper.

I told her about how it is not nice, can make people sad, it is illegal etc. she didn't get a dessert that day (our usual day for having one). And I wrote a few questions on a bit of paper (why stealing is bad, what will you do if you feel like doing it again etc.) and asked her to answer them - she wrote the answers down.

Less than a week later she got a pencil off a boy, gave it to her mum and said that she won two pencils. We checked this with the teacher and the teacher said there was a boy who 'lost' a pencil and was upset about it.

So she knows it is wrong, but is continuing to do it. It is difficult to catch her in the act of it. Has anyone dealt with similar behaviour in a child of a similar age? Any recommendations?

I can force myself to shout at her (this would scare her as I don't shout), I can take her to the local police by pre -arrangement , I'm not sure what the best approach to stop this behaviour is. It could have possibly been going on since she was in nursery as we've always accounted for things showing up as normal mistakes not intentional stealing.

I've felt compelled to post; it just works!

I've got a pc which is over a decade old; I've only ever used Microsoft with my main OS on that machine being windows 7 and then windows 10. With the new requirements for windows 11 being what they were I was considering installing it anyway with some workarounds. My computer appeared to be getting slower, I was annoyed with all of the bloat which goes along with the Microsoft OS, the constant reminders to "finish setting up my device" and use one drive. All of this was a bit too much for me.

I figured I'd have a go at installing a Linux OS. I'd ran Ubuntu years and years ago as an experiment on an evening older pc and it was very much sub par, it looked nice, it was a pain to do anything and didn't play any of the games I wanted at the time.

A little bit of research told me that Linux mint may be a good option. I also read that dual booting can be difficult. So I just backed up my data, and installed it on the hard disk.

It was mostly seamless, I had issues with my graphics driver, which meant I couldn't click the buttons to install mint & crashes, when running off the live disk to see what the os was like. This was part of the reason I just installed it on the hard drive and didn't go through with a 'testing' phase.

Once that was resolved by installing the Nvidia driver I could use mint. This was made quite easy as it was just a few clicks in the gui and made really obvious to see. And the Mint does everything I need it to!

Gaming appears to have come a long, long way, I ran Civ V to test and it worked.

My Bluetooth mouse and keyboard connected without issue.

The libre office suite is great to use and I've found it similar to the Microsoft equivalents.

My computer appears to be faster. I now realise that it was actually just the additional demands of the Microsoft OS on my machine which slowed it.

I have a multi screen set up, this simply just worked, the only tweek I made was selecting my main monitor.

To top it all, and perhaps the most surprising thing for me (and the reason for the post) is the printer just worked. Like, printers never just work. It's just plugged in, recognised and I could print. No additional set up needed.

I'm short, Linux has progressed so much over the years. I thank all those who have worked on it to make it such a great option. It will be my main OS going forward and I'll advocate for it. I'll also ensure that my kids are running a Linux OS when they have computers of their own.

So, if you're reading this and unsure about Linux, don't be. It's great and easy to set up, works flawlessly.