Kids’ Computer Time Keeper for Linux

Sometimes I’m not so great at managing my time. So it makes sense that I’m sometimes not great at managing anyone else’s time either. When it comes to screen time for kids, there needs to be a limit set for how much they use it. We have an Amazon Fire tablet, and it comes with a launcher for kid users called FreeTime which does an excellent job at allowing an adult to set reasonable configurable time limits not just on the total screen time but also to set a range on the hours of the day that use is allowed.

We don’t use Windows anywhere in our house, so the question comes up, how can we make sure that apps and games on an old Linux laptop don’t get overused?


A long-abandoned project called Timekpr would seem to be the obvious choice, if it were maintained. Luckily, there is a newer fork called Timekpr Revived. Actually, this project is deprecated in favor of an even newer beta version called Timekpr nExT that integrates heavily with D-Bus, but Revived still works fine. The linked page shows how to add a PPA to your Debian-ish distro and install the package.

While not exactly like FreeTime, Timekpr checks all the right boxes for me to limit the screen time on a Linux system.