Delightfully Horrible Idea: Twitch Installs Linux

Linux is a delightful OS. There are an amazing range of built-in tools, and innumerable others that can be installed from publicly available repositories using just a single line of commands. You can also hose your entire system with just a handful of characters; something that was en vogue as a method of trolling many years ago. Who knows if either of those will get used when Twitch Installs Arch Linux.

Beginning on Saturday morning, a single keyboard will be controlled by thousands of people whose collective goal is to install a Linux distro in a virtual box. There will undoubtedly be thousands of others trying to thwart the process. We were enthralled with Twitch Plays Pokemon last year. Live viewers’ keystrokes were translated to the Game Boy controls and the majority consensus decided the next move. This was insane with just a few controls, but now we’re talking about an entire keyboard.

Every 10 seconds, the most popular keystroke will be chosen. To put this in perspective, the previous sentence would have taken exactly 10 minutes to type, and only if the majority constantly agreed on what the next letter should be. We can’t tell if it’s going to be interesting or boring to participate. But either way, we can’t wait to see what unforeseen happenings shake out of the process.

42 thoughts on “Delightfully Horrible Idea: Twitch Installs Linux

  1. Just what I needed a PTSD flashback of 80 hour week surrounded by cheaply paid H1-B visa holders fuq’in everything complete up reviewing logs and logs via awk/sed/grep.

    With a heavy furrowed forehead, squinting over the edge of my brows.
    “Exterminatus…”,”Two-Stage Cyclonic Torpedoes”

      1. The monkeys can just eat the other monkeys. With an infinite supply of monkeys this can go on indefinitely. The same way that the Grand Hotel works to allow another guest, will allow the monkey’s to continually feed off the others.

    1. This bugs me too, we’re all big on attribution in the hacker community but for some reason when it comes to GNU we couldn’t care less! It’s just Linux…

      The kernel is the least important part of my OS, swap my Linux kernel with BSD and I wouldn’t notice. Swap my GNU ls with BSD ls and I’ll freak out in seconds.

      `ls / -lah` doesn’t work on BSD due to positional arguments being enforced…

      1. I think the whole “GNU” thing is just dumb. It doesn’t make a very good impression for the masses, those have heard of it have no idea it stands for “Gnu’s not Unix” and when you explain it they almost always have no idea what Unix is so then name is even more lost on them. When it comes down to it we need to dump “GNU” because Linux is a much more marketable name

    2. Bigger side note: There are 2 people in the world who care about that distinction, you and Stallman who’s upset that high contribution to the world has Linus’s pet name on it. Almost everyone else considers Linux to be an operating system and doesn’t make the distinction between Linux and GNU/Linux.

      Also if you think that there is one “correct” way to settle this argument I point you to a whole Wikipedia page on the naming controversy. The very people who created all this never converged on the meaning, though the rest of the world has.

      So you’re right.
      But you’re also wrong.

      1. It’s important because attribution is important.

        Linux is less than half a quater of the story when it comes to a distribution.

        There are other Kernels, such as Darwin, freeBSD… There ae userlands other than GNU such as android, dd-wrt, busybox.

        If you don’t say what you mean it gets confusing.

        1. Shouldn’t we call it MIT/GNU/Linux then? After all, Stallman began developing GNU at his local university, a feat that would have been impossible without those resources.

          Everything is built on derivative works. Linux provides attribution for using GNU utilities as the license dictates. The license doesn’t require an asinine naming scheme.

        1. The thing ive found about Arch is if you do regular linux installs it is WAY faster than any gui mess and totally worth the time to learn. If you dont do regular installs (or dont plan to in the future) then it is WAY slower and MUCH more cryptic. Stick with Ubuntu.
          This is what i usually (roughly) do. Although it looks like they aren’t using EFI…
          parted –script -a optimal /dev/sda mklabel gpt;
          parted –script -a optimal /dev/sda mkpart primary 0 100M;
          sgdisk -t 1:ef00 /dev/sda;
          sgdisk -N 2 -c 2:”root” -t 2:8e00 /dev/sda;
          mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2;
          mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1;
          mount /dev/sda2 /mnt;
          mkdir /mnt/boot;
          mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot;
          pacstrap /mnt;
          genfstab -p /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab;
          pacstrap /mnt refind-efi;
          arch-chroot /mnt /usr/bin/refind-install –alldrivers –usedefault /dev/sda1

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