About BioKids
BioKids is a free, open-source parental-control system for children aged 4–10, built on Debian 13. It is made by Bilal Gürkan Şanlı under the BioStudio label, and is open to everyone under the MIT license.
Why it exists
A young child should be able to use a computer on their own: tap their picture to sign in, open what they want from big tiles, and hear when their time is nearly up. And a parent should be able to set the rules: how long, when, and which sites.
Yet most parental controls make you open an account, send the child's day to a company's servers, and say little to the child about what is seen. BioKids exists to do the opposite:
- The rules and the data stay home. There is no BioKids server and no account.
- The child knows. Supervision is never hidden.
- The panel is simple enough for a parent who is not technical. Any setting that needs explaining lives behind "Advanced".
Who makes it
Bilal Gürkan Şanlı
The developer of BioKids, under the BioStudio label.
BioKids is open source: for bug reports, translations, hardware reports and code, see the Support page.
Promise
Six principles that do not change
They are written into the project's constitution and override every other rule. A feature that conflicts with them is not added.
Nothing leaves the device
No telemetry, analytics, cloud inference or crash reporting. Every outbound connection is listed in the open.
The child knows
No hidden screenshots, no silent keylogging. When a parent watches the screen live, the child is always shown it.
Fail safe, not silent
If protection breaks, the child's session locks and the parent is told. Never "continue unprotected".
Never locks you out
Anything that could lock a parent out is opt-in, reversible, and has a written recovery path.
Offline first
Every core feature works with the network cable unplugged. Cloud services are add-ons a parent turns on.
A panel anyone understands
The panel is made for a parent who is not technical; settings that need explaining sit behind "Advanced".
What it is built on
BioKids stands on free software that people have trusted for years:
- Debian 13 "trixie"
- The Xfce desktop
- The Chromium browser
- dnsmasq and nftables
- Tailscale
- espeak-ng and Piper
- llama.cpp and whisper.cpp
- Kiwix and Wikipedia
- The ShadowWhisperer blocklists
- Fredoka and Noto Color Emoji
BioKids itself is written in Python 3.13 with FastAPI and SQLite; its screens are Jinja2 and hand-written CSS. There is no build step, no npm and no framework. This site is made the same way: nothing is loaded from another server.
Where it stands today
The current version is 2.0.0: the Debian packages and a ready-to-install ISO together. The packages build, pass lintian, and install, upgrade and purge cleanly on Debian 13. The ISO has been installed in VirtualBox (BIOS and UEFI) and beside Windows on a real computer.
Next is publishing the project's own APT repository and release key. What is done, what was dropped and what comes next is in the roadmap; what changed in each version is in the release notes. Every design decision, and why it was made, is in the decisions document.
License
BioKids is MIT licensed: free to use, change and share. The licenses of the software the packages carry are in debian/copyright; those of the models a parent downloads are in src/biokids_ai/models.py.
Press and brand
Name: BioKids, one word, capital B and K. Not "Bio Kids" or "Biokids".
In one sentence: BioKids is a free, open-source parental-control system for children aged 4–10, built on Debian 13, that runs entirely on the computer itself.
In one paragraph: BioKids turns a Debian 13 computer into one a young child can use alone. The child signs in by tapping their picture and lands in a launcher of big tiles; a ring shows the time left, and two voices, Zio and Sio, say when it is nearly up. The parent sets the rules from a panel on the same computer or on their phone: screen-time limits that changing the clock cannot fool, a local filter that blocks harmful sites, a live view of the screen (always shown to the child), and an AI assistant that runs on the computer. There is no account, no cloud and no telemetry. It is MIT licensed.
Logo: a kite whose string ends in a heart, beside the word "BioKids"; the typeface is Fredoka.
- Coral #FF6B5B (Zio)
- Amber #FFB020
- Teal #1FB6A6 (Sio)
- Indigo #4B54C8
- Ground #FBF7F2