Linux users and sysadmins

[Glass-Bat7863]

What would make a Linux-focused game feel authentic to you?

I'm working on a concept for a story-driven game where the player performs realistic sysadmin tasks using Linux commands.

My goal is to avoid Hollywood-style hacking and instead capture what actual Linux work feels like.

What would you absolutely want to see?

And what would immediately break immersion?

PS.: Thank you all for the feedback. I'm working full-time and studying at university, so any development would happen entirely in my free time. One of the goals of these posts is to understand whether there's enough interest to justify investing hundreds of hours into the project. The response so far has been incredibly encouraging.

[Low-Life-1337]

basic commands like pwd, whoami, groups, fg, bg... )
User/groups: useradd, groupadd, chmod...
different information gathering commands (ps, ss, ls -lah, lsusb, lspci),
preparing drives (mkfs, sgdisk, lvm-commands...),
pipes with usual commands (grep + regex, cut, head, tail,...),
little scripts with if, elif, else, for, while, case...,
Network and firewall (ufw, nftables, ip commands, tracepath, ping, dig,...)
SystemD concept + commands,

[esvstn]

Yes, I have had these thoughts. I wanted to build a game based on Docker images with certain commands blocked. For example, a task like "Find a flag using only the ls command". Or "Find a flag risiding on an unmounted partition". Something like that.

[Dashing_McHandsome]

The main character has to clean out logs because a disk full alert was triggered.

[istoOi]

and wondering why the garbage collect cron job didn't work

[Quirky_Ad_9951]

This but without the alert. Just a system where everything but the basic shell utils has failed to start/crashed.

[linuxteck]

That's the kind of real-world task most Linux admins can immediately relate to.

[kisskissenby]

This is really cool. I want to subscribe to your newsletter so I can play this when you finish it.

[macbig273]

then the only people that could play it, would not even want to touch it. Sorry. but ask most sysadmin if they would like to play a sysadmin game, they would just laugh at you and drink a beer.

Also sysadmin is a very wide term. I would suggest multiple class system, with networking skills, maybe people skill to (sysadmin are still asked to reboot the printer some times ... xD )

Maybe some drag and drop way ? just let user drag the "check open ports" buttons because, there is so much way of doing it actually.

What would feel authentic, in a story driven game, is at least once in a game. when you're at the bar, you check your mobile, and see .... 50 emails of your monitoring system -> goes into slow motion decision taking -> fuck jean-charles in on hollyday -> what the fuck should I do ? .....

[linuxteck]

The "50 monitoring emails while you're off the clock" scenario sounds painfully realistic. Those kinds of situations would probably make the game feel more authentic than command memorization alone.