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What is this? What am I looking at?
when Sony released the HDD for the PS2 you could get Linux with it. there was a complete package that came with the Linux dvds, a keyboard, and the 40GB HDD. it was a Playstation 2 branded distro which was a fork of a japanese distro named “Kondara” which was a based on Red Hat. the DE was Window Maker.
I had it, it was pretty dang good in all honesty. The second disk had a bunch of packages on it in case you didn’t have a decent internet connection. There’s still an community for it today that is still making packages and what have you for it.
You could get an official Linux install on your PlayStation 2. That support was later removed which prompted a class action lawsuit.
The lawsuit was about the PS3 removing the OtherOS feature. Which, while handled poorly, made some sense.
The system was initially sold at a significant loss, with the software making up for it. The cell architecture made it excellent at distributed processes, so with the OtherOS feature suddenly the cheapest way to build a supercomputer was buying a bunch of PS3s being sold at a loss and linking them together. Any systems built that way were essentially subsidized by Sony.
What they could have done is have the option to pay to unlock the bootloader for the OtherOS install.
No, what they should’ve done is made Sony eat the losses from its own business screw-up, and send execs to prison for hacking and fraud. Sabotaging people’s property to disable functionality they paid for should’ve been considered a felony violation of the CFAA on a massive scale.
I remember some teacher at school saying that selling something below cost was illegal in Germany. Unfortunately I don’t know if that is true and I never got to ask him about consoles.
Could have made a huge difference on the console market if enforced.
I think the lawsuit was with PS3, not PS2.
It was the PS3 that got support removed, the PS2 Linux support kept around for the entire live, and the Japanese exclusive BB system that the PS2 got is based around it
Yeah I believe the PlayStation OS at the time got hacked by another OS that they allowed to be installed… so they said well shit we can’t have nice things. I used to have Yellowdog running on mine
It’s so cool, it even has goddamn OpenGL and drivers to exposed the full Emotion Engine to Linux
pff wake me when they port Windows 11 to the PS2
Wake me up when they make a proper desktop port for windows 11
Wake me up when they make a proper Windows 11.
I say as someone who has used windows products since 98, wake me when they make a proper windows OS.
(also I’m fiddling around with mint on a vm to make the switch for my next computer easier)
Blame the organizations that built out PS3 server farms just for crunching numbers.
Oh no. They used something they owned in a different way than the manufacturer foresaw. How evil!
Evil is a bit strong, but they’re selling the console with the expectation they’ll make up more in games sales, yes it kind of jams up the business plan.
So blame the dumb business plan?
Are you arguing the PS3 should have released at $1000 when everyone thought $600 was already laughably astronomically high? Or would you have preferred an underspec system?
If the choice is between that and letting Sony defraud its customers by sabotaging their property, then Hell yes, Sony should’ve been forced to charge $1000!
What the fuck is wrong with you that you think Sony’s literal crimes were OK?!
I’m not defending them removing the functionality and I agree it was sold with a feature, that should have been supported. I just think we didn’t see the Other OS option continue through the generations because the hardware’s price point was taken advantage of.
Sony could have imposed a fee to unlock Other OS, but I don’t think anyone would have felt better shelling out an additional $400 to use it. Situation becomes then home customer gets no value from it, businesses are no longer incentivized to buy playstations, and Sony has to continue supporting this thing that few people are paying to access.
If that’s the real price and the games are then also $25 cheaper, sure. They’re not giving you that money for free, the average consumer spends the same amount on the system+games either way. If they decide to use a misleading pricing strategy to manipulate people they don’t get to complain when people use products they bought differently to how they were intended.
Their plan was to make up the difference in game sales. You were paying full price with the cost shifted to the games to trick you into thinking you got a bargain.
If I sell you a hot dog for $1 with a business model that you will buy an overpriced soda 5 minutes later at the stand next door, I don’t get to take that hotdog back after sale when I see you didn’t also buy the soda.
Selling products as loss leaders is not some absurd esoteric strategy, and it was quite normal for consoles to be subsidized with that exact goal. They needed systems affordable enough to get into homes, otherwise there’s no user base. No user base means no opportunity for game sales. No game sales, and it ends up as the Dreamcast.
So it starts to sound like their big mistake was ever allowing Linux and general computing to begin with? Sony were the only ones doing that even while the competition was an actual x86 machine running some form of Windows. Users still had to buy a PC to use office.
Companies (and governments) saw an opportunity for cheap computers that outperformed traditional servers and took advantage of it. Now no one gets Linux.
The ps3 was an oddly specd system with little documentation for developers. It was overdeveloped and under utilized. Could have saved on r&d with the cell processor and gone with normal architecture eg ps4 and 5.
Edit to add that the cell processor was best at float point calculations rather than raster graphics pipelines. So the best use case scenario were things like folding@home or the Linux os server stream.
I think I’d rather things cost what they need to cost, rather than games being expensive because the console was cheap. That way the manufacturer won’t be so invested in what you do with it after the sale, and you’re not getting scammed on the software pricing.
Okay well you go try convince the general public to pay $1000 ($1700 today) for a toy. Your primary competitor is using games to subsidize their hardware too at $300 but completely locked and unable to perform general computing. Good luck.
The organizations using computers to compute you mean?
