Twitch’s latest insane adventure: Installing Linux

Twitch playing Pokémon was easy mode. Tomorrow, Twitch viewers will be invited to do something altogether more challenging: install Arch Linux. Using the same Twitch chat-driven concept as the collaborative Pokémon playthrough, anyone will be able to enter commands and control the installation process.

Normally, installing Linux is quicker and easier than winning Pokémon. The install processes have been made broadly idiot-proof, especially if you’re installing into a safe virtual machine environment and so don’t even run the risk of clobbering a disk accidentally. But if Twitch chat has accomplished anything, it’s breeding a better idiot, one that is mindlessly bloody-minded, and so we fully anticipate that there will be trolling. Trolling Pokémon revolved principally around getting stuck repeatedly in menus and releasing captured Pokémon—annoying to those trying to complete the game but little that would force players to start from scratch.

Linux, in contrast, opens the door to a whole world of exotic trolling opportunities. There are old classics such as rm -rf / to wipe the disk, or dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda to really wipe the disk. There’s the casual annoyance of kill -9 1, or comedy options such as the bash fork bomb of :(){ :|:& };:. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the machine casually trapped in a reboot loop or have its hardware removed to leave it incapable of I/O.