My recommendation would be Tor and use bridges. Bridges connect to Tor for you, and the IPs of bridges are secret. So no one really knows that you’re connecting to Tor. They can only see you connect to a random IP. For extra security you can use the “tails” OS.

While not foolproof, should be good enough for any sort of “normal” people under mass surveillance. If you’re special enough to have human attention on you, I don’t know sadly.

Finally, pictures of firewalls I can get scammed by!

If I understood correctly, it’s free software anyway, so why the discussion?

I love the Panasonic toughbooks. Most of them have a handle so they’re great to carry around like a briefcase. Had mine in the boot during driver safety training, it got knocked around voilently, not a single scratch. Also put a SSD in, running it with pop OS since many years.

Betterbird

Recommendation

I think the Raspberry Pi has a suit of prepackaged games and things like that, which you could use. Give your Raspberry Pi a good casing, and it will be indestructible.

Tangent

I would still warn them from the dangers of the modern digital world, in the sense of surveillance and censorship of social media, what is posted on the internet stays there forever, how proprietary software tricks the user and is oftentimes malware (Gmail, Windows, etc.) and things like that.

I mean, computers are cool, but the mainstream computer world is filled with so much nonsense or outright malice. And if I had a child, I wouldn’t want them to be harmed by that. Like, I don’t want my child to be indoctrinated into the sexist manosphere, just because the Instagram Algo said so and will do literally anything to keep them on the platform as long as possible. Software and computers are cool, but there’s so much vile and genuinely dangerous stuff even for adults. For a child it must be hard to navigate. If you say, for example, that Apple devices literally scan every single picture on your device and send the result to Apple, you’ll sound like a crazed tin foil hat lunatic. But this is quite literally what happens with MediaAnalysisD. In the USA, a young family got harassed by police because they sent a picture of their sick child to their doctor via Gmail.

Edit: typo.