I have in my mind the idea that I start them off from an offline barebones command-line interface, and then we gradually learn file management and maybe other things in that environment while it is still shiny. At some point the child is familiar enough with the computer that we install X or Wayland or whatever it may be. This is mainly in order to start them off in a fairly safe environment until they have shown they are able to handle more.

The questions I have are:

(1) Is this a good idea? I'm aware they'll probably run into Windows as soon as they enter elementary school, but I'm not too concerned they'd fall behind their peers.

(2) Which OS would be a good fit? I had my sights set on NetBSD at first, but then I learned its non-graphical interface does not support Unicode, which is probably a dealbreaker since our native language uses non-ASCII characters.[1]

I'm still leaning toward a BSD because it would be more of a complete, stand-alone operating system than a Linux distribution, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

[1]: Not that I'm planning to localise the OS, but I suspect we'd start off creating files with little messages in our own language.