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Twitch Viewers Will Try To Collaboratively Install Arch Linux (twitchinstalls.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the can-linux-experts-work-together dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Early last year, an anonymous developer had the idea to try to crowd-source a game of Pokemon using Twitch.tv. 16 days of continuous play later, they were victorious, with an estimated 1.17 million people participating. A new experiment is now trying to ramp up the complexity: the goal is to install Arch Linux. "Every ten seconds, the most popular keystroke in Twitch chat will be entered into an Arch Linux virtual machine." The launch page recommends taking a look at the Arch Linux Wiki, beginner's guide, and a list of bash commands. People in the video stream chat are already discussing strategy.

12 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. rm -rf trolls? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Won't it just end up broken with an rm -rf at some point?

    1. Re:rm -rf trolls? by iONiUM · · Score: 2

      Yes, there is no way this is going to work. The reason Twitch plays Pokemon is so popular is because one person can't really mess it up. Sure, there were hours of Ash being stuck in the wall because everyone was saying go in the wrong direction, but that's totally different than deleting the entire pokedex (which would be equivalent to sudo rm -rf) and having to start completely over.

    2. Re:rm -rf trolls? by fisted · · Score: 2

      that hasn't worked with GNU rm in a long time, sudo or not.

      --
      CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
    3. Re:rm -rf trolls? by Bengie · · Score: 2

      Modern implementations of rm reject that.

    4. Re:rm -rf trolls? by The+Wild+Norseman · · Score: 2

      This is an ingenious way to demonstrate to 1.17 million users why they have Windows on their computers.

      Yeah, and Windows 10 is an ingenious way to demonstrate to 300 million users why they shouldn't.

      --
      "A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
    5. Re:rm -rf trolls? by JSG · · Score: 2

      "Ugh, installing Arch in itself, is an ingenious way to demonstrate"

      So you don't like to know how your OS works or care about having the choice about what is on your PC/laptop. Perhaps you should not hang around a site with the strap line "News for nerds".

      Me, I like choice: I like being able to decide for myself whether I want MS, Apple or Linux or BSD or whatever. As it turns out, I like the Linux way of doing things. I also like to mess around and tinker. So I choose Arch and Gentoo for my own stuff and Ubuntu, Centos and SLES in general for work. I also make quite a lot of use of FreeBSD via pfSense and am tempted to get in deeper.

      I love having choice. Would you rather a monoculture?

      BTW: My wife's laptop runs Arch - she doesn't know and she doesn't care. It just works and magically updates every now and then - again she doesn't know this, it just works. OK I'm a consultant but I have the tools given to me by the best and I no longer have to explain why that bloody yellow shield keeps on pestering her nor what the hell is Windows 10 and why it wants to install all the time and then suck her eyes out.

    6. Re:rm -rf trolls? by MoarSauce123 · · Score: 2

      This discussion shows nicely why Linux based OS are still only niche solutions for the common user. Can't even agree on what the right command is to destroy an install.....

  2. Easy by jwymanm · · Score: 3, Informative

    Step 1: Install Antergos - https://antergos.com/

  3. "Twitch goes to /pol" by cfalcon · · Score: 2

    This is pretty great, but there's a lot of keystrokes to average out. Is it just plurality? Wouldn't there always be enough first-past-the-post votes to jam backspace, on pretty much any command?

    I'm more wondering at this point, what if twitch goes to 8 chan, which has some content that is illegal in some jurisdictions? Or what if twitch goes somewhere even less moderated and downloads illegal-almost-everywhere content? Who has the legal liability on that?

  4. It actually doesn't accept full commands by iONiUM · · Score: 4, Informative

    So my previous post about how this won't work is actually wrong. I've been on the actual twitch channel, and the instructions are as follows:

    Instructions
    Avaliable commands:

    • Letters
    • Most special keys
    • 'space'
    • 'enter'
    • 'backspace'
    • 'system_reset'

    So how it actually works is that everyone types 1 letter (or I suppose it takes the first letter you've typed) and it uses that. So to type 'sudo rm -rf /' it would require people to type those exact letters in that sequence. Considering there will probably be many people there at once, some of whom don't want that typed, it will be significantly harder to troll.

  5. Exceptionally useless by SecurityGuy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This really seems like an exceptionally useless thing to do.

    "Hey, everybody! Let's take something that one person can do well in minutes and have a million people do it badly over a few days, if it ever works at all!"

    Just...why?!?

    1. Re:Exceptionally useless by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      Just...why?!?

      For the lulz? I wonder if it is more useful than talking about how useless it is on Slashdot? This article itself will have many thousands of words poured into the comment field and to what end? At least they may have a working Linux install at the end. All we have is that empty feeling your get when you think someone is wrong on the internet.