I remember downloading a copy of King Missile’s Detachable Penis incorrectly credited to The Flaming Lips. Like … I must’ve known it wasn’t them, but it sat on my Flaming Lips playlist for years and I just assumed it was something from their earlier, weirder 80’s days.

I remember talking about this on a message board once before and like 3 other people chimed in with this exact same song, apparently it was a bit of a thing. Probably just one person’s mistake, but the internet felt a lot smaller back then and it’s not surprising it would’ve propagated like that.

Isn’t this one of Zitron’s oft-cited horsemen?

I kind of unironically believe that speedrunning is a core pillar of the internet and maybe also even kind of humaity as a whole, going forward? Stick with me here.

Speedrunning is a self-organizing, self-policing culture built off the back of competitive/cooperative play. Despite centering around somewhat corporate products like videogames and having big events like GDQ, it’s not really centralized in any meaningful way. It’s driven by fan enthusiasm to draw in new people and push limits further. That also incentivizes identifying people who would cheat the system.

Extrapolating on that, as we move into a post-scarcity society with various exigent AI threats, there’s going to be a lot of concern with how we choose to spend our time and brainpower. Using play to collectively push our limits, tear apart code, and identify flaws is gonna be a big thing.

Sorry if that was poorly worded, I’m working on some big ideas here and I don’t know how to convey them well. I know that all sounds kind of silly, and it surely is to some extent, but I do think there’s more there than meets the eye if you just initially handwave it away as “playing videogames really fast for fun”.

My recommendation for new Linux users is to keep it vanilla: Mint (Debian), Fedora, or Arch. Flavor of the month distros are going to come with a lot of baked in opinions from the parent distro that may make troubleshooting more difficult if you try to treat it like that. Sure CachyOS is Arch based, but it has a custom kernel and other things. People will argue the point, but I think vanilla is just better. I also worry about distros that have yet to sufficiently establish themselves and the kind of support you can expect from them going into the future. Nothing is a bigger Linux deterrent than getting dragged into distro drama as maintainers fight, argue, fork, and drop support.

Mint: Beginner friendly. Some might recommend Debian, but I’ve always found setup to be a bit tedious. Mint has been around long enough to prove itself and has a well-established community.

Arch: Don’t let the reputation get to you, this is a perfectly fine distro to start with if you are a person of moderate to advanced skill level, especially since the archinstall script makes actual installation much easier. If you like the idea of the Arch wiki acting as a kind of instruction manual for an OS that you haven’t seen in years and hand-picking a lot of your software while making small adjustments in config files to get most things working (clearly documented in the wiki!), this is a good choice. I avoided it for years based on reputation while I fought with Ubuntu and I’m angry at how much I let community opinion deter me when this was the correct choice for me all along.

Fedora: Less to comment here as I don’t have a lot of personal experience, but from what I understand it’s a good compromise between Debian and Arch. A bit faster to update but not bleeding edge. Considered a bit more stable than Arch.

The most important advice I can offer is twofold,

1. Just make the switch. Once you get a better idea of what you need and what works and doesn’t for you, you’ll be able to make a more informed decision on if a more specific distro would suit you better.
2. Linux is not Windows. You’ll never be able to replicate your workflow and feel 1:1 and you can’t/shouldn’t consider that a failure. Be prepared to make small adjustments but I do think you’ll find the effort worth it overall.

Benn Jordan is a gem, do yourself a favor and just go watch all his stuff.

His latest on robot dogs is amazingly well-executed and researched with terrifying conclusions.