I had never tried it and was super happy after seeing how lightweight it was.

Ooh ooh! I know this! Alpine! I run this together with MS-DOS on my Pentium 3, but FreeDOS should be no problem too.

I have seen your Debian/Arch addendum, but since it’s meant to be easy and for simple media consumption only, how about Fedora Silverblue with a couple of Flatpak games for kids? You’ll barely have to look after it as it’s immutable, will update itself and the stock Fedora Gnome setup is pretty basic and simple enough for a smart kid. Plus he’s two- I doubt he will need anything outside of Flatpaks and a paint program.

As a DOS fan I like this a lot but, if you would allow me one nit-pick, your CSS references PerfectDos as the font, but that isn’t the font in the screenshot. Is this on purpose?