Downloader: Think you've mastered Linux? Prove it, with Suicide Linux

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Think you've mastered Linux? Prove it, with Suicide Linux

Linux gurus who pride themselves on their skills with the command line would finally have a way to prove it if one guy's wacky idea came to fruition. Yes, it's Suicide Linux, where any unrecognized command is parsed as "rm -rf /" ... that's Linux for "your hard drive's content go boom." Sorry, no helpful spelling correction in Bash, just boom. This concept popped up on Sam Hughes' qntm.org last year, and has been making the rounds of the web again this week.

Why would you ever want to play Suicide Linux? Well, it's certainly not practical, but it makes more sense as a game than as an actual operating system. See how many days you can make it without erasing all your files! Hell, I probably wouldn't even be able to survive Suicide Mac OS X for more than a week (sometimes I flub my Quicksilver commands when I'm tired, okay?!), so Suicide Linux sounds to me like a test invented by an overdramatic movie villain.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I couldn't find an actual download of a Suicide Linux distro, but it seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to create ... especially for someone who could use it.