this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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[–] Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

If they subsidized it, wouldn't that risk businesses buying it as a cheap-for-its-specs option for their office computers? It's not locked to being a gaming machine like consoles. You can just install windows on it.

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

That's the feel good warm marketing Sony spun for the thing. The PS3 sold around 88 million units. It flopped at first because it didn't have any games for it. The Linux thing was a quirky fun but ultimately useless feature. You had to code custom software for the thing, it had no commercial software for Linux on a PS3. Its sales ballooned after it became the cheapest bluray on the market, and it was after the removal of otherOS support.

Less than 10 thousand were used for distributed computation clusters. The famous navy supercomputer only had 1.7 thousand units or so. Against the global sales numbers it was barely a rounding error.

Edit: replied to the wrong comment but I think it is still relevant. The risk of companies snatching steam machines in bulk is null, stop listening to LTT.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 12 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

That's a tradition with gaming systems, see the Navy's playstation supercomputer!

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

That's the feel good warm marketing Sony spun for the thing. The PS3 sold around 88 million units. It flopped at first because it didn't have any games for it. The Linux thing was a quirky fun but ultimately useless feature. You had to code custom software for the thing, it had no commercial software for Linux on a PS3. Its sales ballooned after it became the cheapest bluray on the market, and it was after the removal of otherOS support.

Less than 10 thousand were used for distributed computation clusters. The famous navy supercomputer only had 1.7 thousand units or so. Against the global sales numbers it was barely a rounding error.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what your point is - yes it was a broadly impractical thing to do, that's not in dispute.

[–] ms_lane@lemmy.world 7 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

That's a bit different IIRC, they purchased them directly from Sony and they didn't have any of the OtherOS hardware lockouts like retail consoles did.

[–] coriza@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

At launch and for a good while PS3 came with a boot to Linux enabled by default, some universities around the globe bought some "from the shelf" to make some server farm and such.

[–] ms_lane@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Retail units couldn't access most of the RSX in OtherOS for Sony reasons, Geohot fixing that was why they killed OtherOS.

Apparently the DOD units never had any lockouts on the GPU.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

I'm not entirely sure on the difference here, valve is selling them directly and by all the reporting we've seen, there aren't going to be hardware restrictions on any of the models.