Make a compelling, rewarding¹ case for not staying on the computer all the time, that works the best and is the most reliable, because when they overstay then that will be in the back of their minds.

Otherwise you're just going to motivate them to work around this.

¹as in, not you rewarding them for obeying (although that works, too) but a good reason why not being on the computer at those hours is more beneficial to them than doing it.

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Now that's pure evil.

Just give them their personal computer...

+1 for pointing out that the problem has a social aspect and trying to solve it with purely technical means is futile.

I still like the idea of unplugging tactic... notwithstanding that good parenting plays a big part in this, which requires not only a good understanding of the self and the human condition. But the ability to apply it to others as well.

Jan K. saying that is pure evil.

Shows me a lot about your personality. Literal over hypothetical, and jest, along with what you conciser as pure evil, no shades od gray for extenuating circumstances?

the lesser of the two evils.

How was your childhood?

taking the wires that help bring power to the computer and ripping them out of the computer then touching the live wires to the subject in question use as a means of positive reinforcement to curtail their usage of the computer.

would you say that too is pure evil or no?

Scrapped a (longish) reply, but a warning: unplugging may damage the computer (too).

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missed word jest
a thing said or done for amusement; a joke.

or

who cares really as if....

Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. Easy to set up and does the job.

On second thought, there seems to be an easy workaround for the porttime solution.

When you start the X session like this:

then the X session stays active and the user is not logged out by logoutd.

logoutd? Hurry! Please edit the typo before yet another somethingd debate breaks out!

Please share a sanitized version of your /etc/porttime file.

I think it works now. Overall there were three steps:

1. create a file /etc/porttime and add a line with time restrictions
2. start logoutd at boot (add it to rc.local)
3. change the runlevel to 4

The user is now also logged out of his X session.

Hello,
that is it, i finally found that 2019 thread that was helpful when implementing porttime on children's computer.

1-How to limit the time kids will graphically (and else) login on a machine ? is this it

2-How would you do it without porttime ? which seems gone for good

thanks,

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Not that it's relevant or anything, but I'm pretty sure it was possible to set timers with "cron" since the seventies.

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Is this pam thing in slackware 15rc2 ?
Will look at it this evening !

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yes pam_time.so is here Tonus, thanks

now crawling through the doc, need more time to understand this pam_time.so thing

http://www.linux-pam.org/Linux-PAM-h...-pam_time.html
well porttime was great, pam_time.so does thing a bit differently
For the time being editing the file time.conf works well work as-is on Slackware 15 RC2.
So far no need to change files in /etc/pam.d/

the cron way may be the way indeed to auto-logout, open to suggestion.