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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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Steam Hardware
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A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
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They should pay someone to finalize the jailbreak of the PS5, because SteamOS should run great on it if you have a hacked console.
just use bazzite and live in the future
We shouldn’t need a jailbreak.
If Apple has to allow 3rd party stores, why not Sony?
There were a case back in the days of PS3, where sony removed ability to run linux from new versions of console. They were sued and lost, but still decided to pay the fine, rather than returning functionality.
The main issue as I see it, is that they sell consoles as cheap as possible (previously they even sold them at a loss) and then return such investment by selling you games and subscription. By opening ability to install linux, not only they will loss profit from upper mentioned part on existing devices, but there a chance people will start buying PS5 to use as a regular desktop or general server or whatever, due to being simply cheapest prebuild option available for such specs. Same point was rised by Valve actually, they too was afraid that if they start selling gabebox at loss, people will buy them for anything, but playing games.
All that being said, fuck sony, microsoft and any other big company, that locks it's hardware. PS4 still have usable x86 hardware, but soon will be a landfill, cause you can't really do anything with, other than play ps4 games.
It's the Gabecube.
Yes, that video is 14 years old.
I mean their tablets/phones are still locked to ios.
Apple only allows 3rd party stores in the EU*
Yeah and even then, the compliance is malicious
And Google is about to copy it worldwide
It's gone beyond the EU. Last week Apple announced third party app stores will be coming to Brazil and
Everywhere except Freedom Land™
For now, this is just the start and when apple is forced to do it in enough regions, they will have to relent.
I hope my next iPhone will be open like this and have a desktop mode when docked.
The Apple iDroid™
Yeah, they aren't going to be bringing it to the US unless they are forced to by law in the US unfortunately :( great time to be a postmarketOS user with Google now being as restrictive..
I was looking at that the other day. I wish my old android could be modded to run it.
This would make me use it again, it's just gathering dust since I have a gaming laptop (bought on sale years ago, much better than the ps5), but mostly just use blender and watch tv, would be sick if it made it so I can play simracing games on it with my moza wheel because I never want to close out of my projects on my laptop.
It'd be nice to use it as a homeserver too, just leave it connected to the router and throw some selfhosted apps on there or whatever. Be so much more useful as another linux pc now that I don't really game and if I do it's never an exclusive. Just don't care for linear single player story games.
Isn't this what multiple workspace is for? Or is that only KDE
If your firmware is old enough you can jailbreak it and run steamos already
I still get use of mine through my steam deck using Chiaki4Deck remote play, I had a big PS digital library built up and it’s the easiest way for me to access it with minimal setup. I’m not buying Skyrim again, I refuse
Well actually no, because consoles tend to have very divergent, oddball architecture, compared to normal PC x86_64, where it tends to be fairly to extremely difficult to basically reverse engineer the drivers... because the normal drivers there are propietary, Sony keeps em secret.
Instead, they seem to have been collaborating with AMD and basically some open source hackers to get FSR4 working on RDNA 3 GPUs... 7000 series AMD GPUs, the Steam Machine, etc.
You can run steamos on a jailbroken ps5 already. You need to be on a fairly old firmware though
Huh, you're right, I didn't know that.
But yeah, looks like the jailbreak process only works up to firmware v6-ish... which means you'd have to have a PS5 that was mfg'd before, and hasn't been connected to the internet since basically December 2022.
And, apparently, because this doesn't actually overwrite the PS5's OS, you have to do some fuckery to boot into SteamOS every time?
https://technave.com/gadget/Developers-have-found-a-way-to-turn-your-Sony-PS5-into-a-Steam-Machine-46446.html
PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series are all x86_64, though, unless I'm misunderstanding?
Yes but... they have varying degrees of nonstandard busses and timings and weird, proprietary, basicslly custom hardware, as well as often having weird, propietary implementations of that hardware, that often only work with a bunch of other weird custom drivers on other components...
This is why emulation is hard, you habe to reverse engineer all that shit and then basically virtualize it and then try to map it to actually standard hardware.
Making a linux distro runs into many of thr same things, just, without (as much of) the virtualization parts.
Nah, I've seen jailbroken PS5 running SteamOS. Hardware doesn't need an emulation at all.
PS3 was an emulation hell, but since then hardware is basically PC compatible SoC
Consoles have really been getting closer to more standard hardware over the last years. The WiiU was a mostly custom PowerPC box, with a proprietary version of wifi for the gamepad, and including hardware specifically to run Wii games. The Switch was a barely modified nvidia shield, with bluetooth wireless controllers. The PS3 had a fully custom CPU, and old models included PS2 hardware for backwards compatibility, the PS4 is x86_64 with a custom AMD GPU.
For the PS4/PS5, the majority of effort on running Linux is in getting it to boot in the first place. While some hardware does require patches to existing drivers (like mesa on PS4), or sometimes fully custom drivers (like the CPU fan on PS4), other hardware is completely standard, over a standard interface. Like the HDD and Blu-Ray drives on the PS4.
The big difference is that a game console is "allowed" to deviate from standards, as it does not need to be compatible with anything outside the control of the manufacturer. This results in often small differences that require changes to a kernel which wouldn't work on any other device.
The biggest reason why emulation is hard, is often no longer the custom hardware like it used to be, but the OS and other fully custom standards like a graphics API. The structure of games is completely different too. The old "ship the drivers on the game disc" like on the Wii no longer holds true on modern consoles, and emulators don't need to ensure the exact timing of an optical drive matches to get a game to work.
There have been some attempts to get modern console games to work through kernel patches and translation layers, see horizon-linux and fpPS4, proving just how close modern console hardware is to standard PCs.
All that being said, I don't think SteamOS on PS5 would work for multiple reasons. It's extremely difficult to get the process simple enough for the average consumer, especially with Sony quickly patching any exploits required to boot it. It's also not in Valve's business interest to make it easier and explicitly supported to buy a cheaper and more powerful standardized machine. As they would just be creating a direct competitor to the Steam Machine.
Got nothing to add other than you know this shit better than I do, appreciate the specificity!
EDIT:
I apparently do have something to add:
https://technave.com/gadget/Developers-have-found-a-way-to-turn-your-Sony-PS5-into-a-Steam-Machine-46446.html
https://github.com/ps5-linux/ps5-linux-loader
There have been some recent discoveries that potentially make jailbraking a PS5 permanently easily possible, but yes right now it is too complicated and requires old firmware versions.
As for it being a competitor to the Steam machines... doubtful at the price they now announced. It is rather more likely that if they can get people with second hand jailbroken PS5 hooked to the Steam ecosystem that they are likely to upgrade to a Steam Machine 2 in the future.
Ah, yeah, good points. I imagine even just getting their wireless controller receiver working would be quite a lot of reverse engineering
FSR4 on RDNA3 is meh. Image quality is better, but performance is underwhelming. You have to go down from quality to balanced preset to get same gains as with FSR3