BASH Souls

I have been thinking a lot about my experience since switching my primary gaming and production desktop to Linux and also I have been playing Dark Souls. Naturally, I have come to the realization that the experience of using and learning Linux and the experience of playing Dark Souls are the same... exactly the same.

The gamers reading this are going to say that Linux is way harder than Dark Souls. While the Linux users will say a game that seemingly takes pleasure in punishing the player has nothing in common with my sensible Operating System! And both of them are wrong! Linux and Dark Souls have many things in common. They are both punishing to the new comer. Also their fan bases have a very similar mentality that can be summarized in the Dark Souls-ism "git gud!". Both are extremely rewarding to those that put in the effort and they have a gameplay loop that can't be beat! Yes linux has a gameplay loop and its a good one!

In Dark Souls you get dropped into a world with virtually no instructions or directions and try as you might you just keep dying. Similarly in Linux you get dropped into a desktop environment, and need to try and get your games running. In the process you mess things up. What drives you forward is curiosity. But there has to be a payoff for this curiosity to continue to drive you.

The Compulsion Loop

I'm going to take a bit of a detour here to talk some psychology. Specifically the psychology of a Compulsion Loop .

The Compulsion Loop

The compulsion loop is a habitual chain of activities that users feel compelled to repeat. It does this by creating the anticipation of a reward. Giving the user an activity to be completed. After completing the activity presents the user with the reward for their efforts. It can then present the user with the possibility to restart the loop for another reward.

In Dark Souls the loop is wander in a direction, encounter an enemy, get killed, respawn head back to where you died, learn the enemy patterns, kill them and progress.

In Linux the loop is decide to do something, start searching google and reading wikis, fuck something up, fix it, then finally accomplish your goal and realized you learned a lot along the way.

In both worlds their are two currencies you need in ample supply, Patience and curiosity. Weather learning the patterns of the large monster blocking your way, Or creating a custom RICE to make the desktop environment you have always wanted.

The "Git Gud" mentality

Nexus Mod to replace the "You Died" message

Many of the most die hard Souls fans and Diehard Linux users share a mindset that can frustrate the new user or player. I call this mindset the "Git Gud" mindset. You die to the asylum demon 10 times? git gud! You accidentally use a fire keepers soul instead of using it to upgrade your estus flask? lol git gud! You just want a GUI application to edit some config file on Linux? Learn VIM and git gud!! This is frustrating to someone new and too be completely honest puts a lot of people off.

But to defend these diehards for a minute. I think that many outsiders misunderstand this "git gud" mentality. This is rarely an indictment of the person asking for help skills, it is more that the diehard fans know fucking up is part of the process of learning. You will die in Dark Souls and you almost certainly will goof something up in Linux that requires you to do some command line level nonsense to fix it.

Linux diehards also know that a new users best tool is often the documentation. Weather it's the man pages or the extremely detailed Arch wiki (You don't even need to use arch, btw). So when they tell you sit down and read the docs they are not being elitist they are trying to tell you the best way to learn.(Ok some are being elitist but its not all or even most I promise)

Personal Experience

I will provide 2 anecdotes from my own experience that i think illustrate this similarity between the two worlds. In Dark Souls I finally had made it to the 4 Kings boss in the Abyss at the bottom of New Londo ruins. After dying multiple times to the 1-2 kings I saw and going off to do some weapons material grinding and going back to face the 4 kings. As each king fell I counted off. 1, 2, 3, 4!! I had finally killed 4 Kings... and then promptly died to a FIFTH king that had spawned. Realizing my mistake too late and that really it was a challenge to reduce the boss health bar to zero and not a specific number of kings.

By this point I was familiar with the Dark Souls way and begrudgingly trudged my way back down to the boss fight to begin again.

My next anecdote comes from the Linux world. I run a Proxmox server off of my old PC hardware. It runs all my local services, PVR, website hosting, wirguard, etc. For the most part I manage it with the wonderful resource Proxmox Community Scripts . Proxmox is based off of Debian and while trying to do something on it I ran a simple, or what I thought was simple. apt update && apt upgrade. However this was apparently NOT something I should have done on a proxmox system. What I had done was accidentally run a partial system upgrade that broke everything about my proxmox server. Panic ensued, the Web-GUI was broken, my services were down. I then spent the next few hours furiously reading forum and blog posts and various wikis. After a stressful few hours I managed to repair my server and get it upgraded properly to the latest Debian base. I also learned that I needed to use the much safer apt update && apt dist-upgrade or better yet the built in Proxmox upgrade utilities.

What I'll point out here is that I fucked up big time in both of these scenarios, but that was NOT the end of the journey for me. In both of these cases I learned something. In Dark Souls it was the "The boss isn't dead until the health bar is gone". In Linux it was how to recover a botched upgrade.

I'll say that the later is a much more useful thing to know how to do. It helped me understand the system I run and depend on better.

Wrapping up

This is I think a key appeal of Linux as an operating system. You can so profoundly mess it up but it is always recoverable and you will learn a lot along the way. Much like how in dark souls you will always die but death is just part of the journey. So keep at it, we wouldn't want to see you go hollow now would we!