[deepnet]

SteamOS seems less hostile to users.

In Sony's case upgradable has meant forcibly downgradeable.

Many bought a PS3 solely because it ran Linux, this was removed by an update.

Sony's famous battle over removing 'other-OS' and its shameful tactics against Hotz exemplified a culture of mistrust of end users and disdain for 'off-label' uses.

Sadly it has a long history of this culture, q.v. the 1990s software removal of Digital-Video-in for European digital video cameras - preventing one dumping back to digital tape - removing much of the value.

Sony, itself, has expressed regrets, like the loss of the digital Walkman market with their near unusable proprietary music codecs that took hours to transcode & upload.

Sony, genius engineering hamstrung by legal.

Explicitly, by their vast media catalogue & the piracy boojums entailed.

When the superior Betamax lost the format wars to VHS because of selective media licensing in the 1980s, Sony responded by becoming a media empire.

Sony has broken its own tech ever since.

[overcast]

I think you're really stretching it by saying "many" bought the PS3 because it ran Linux. Many bought the PS3 because it played PS3 games, that's it. Linux on a desktop PC is only a couple percent if they are lucky, no way console people were anywhere near that.

[deepnet]

Not most but many.

It was a subsidised platform with great specs, the cheapest linux box available and ran on a tv, never mind free console & media player. A lot of my student contempories bought it solely for Linux as it was the cheapest way to a Linux platform.

I cite the Condor cluster using 1760 PS3s, once the 33rd fastest super-computer in the world. There are many other published Playstation clusters (PS2 also). The cell processor was highly desirable and very powerful for the price.

I will always thank Sony as 'otherOS' allowed me to evangelise Linux & indeed computing to many families who never considered owning a computer. To kids passively consuming games I could show the power to create them with Linux and turn a passion for gaming into a passion for coding - I was not alone in this.

'OtherOS' use was both significant, socially important, and moreover printed on the box when bought - this seems contractual & IMHO Hotz was in the right to re-enable it.

Sony have world leading engineers and tech, that perfection should deliberately be downgraded for non-engineering reasons breaks my heart.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

Sadly I feel I can no longer own or evangelise Sony devices until Hotz can too - it was quite unjust behaviour.

Hotz did not lose in court, the courts agreed with Hotz, but his exclusion from Sony ownership was coerced against his will, uncivilly, nonetheless.

[paulmd]

Yes, the subsidies used to factor into that bigtime. The hardware was sold at a loss, in the expectation of making a profit on controllers/accessories, games, subscriptions, etc. That's no longer the case nowadays - the XB1 and PS4 are both being sold at a profit (or at least not a loss).

I think the trend away from specialty processors with speciality GPUs attached like the Xenon [note: different from Xeon] in the XB360 and the Cell in the PS3, to commodity Jaguar x86 APUs with onboard iGPUs is a big reason behind that. Honestly the XBone is really no different than going out and building yourself a mITX PC on the FM2+ socket, for Linux purposes. Nowadays you're better off with something like the Raspberry Pi for intro-to-computing, although I am a big fan of the ECS Liva series myself.

The Cell is actually a really amazing processor in a lot of ways. It's really more of a SMP system with a ring-topology interconnect than a traditional SMT processor. You have to specifically build your design around it, but if you do so it's really fast. It's actually only recently that general-purpose x86 has caught up enough that it's feasible to emulate it. It would have been a very desirable piece of hardware for HPC, if you had stuff tailored to that architecture.