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Comment by gautamcgoel | Hacker News Reader

It would be awesome if you could install Linux on modern Xbox or PS4 consoles and use them as PCs...

I’m not sure how much of a benefit that’d be at this point — the PS3 was some custom hardware that was unique to its era, while the current consoles are 5-year-old x86 chips running custom OSes. Putting Linux into that mix only gets you a stable, but outdated, hardware platform.

I was really thinking more about the upcoming PS5 and Xbox Scarlett, which both should have Zen 2 CPUs and Navi GPUs, along with a generous helping of GDDR6 memory and SSDs.

At launch, those systems will probably be very competitive with off-the-shelf PCs. By 2022, they won't look as good.

One thing these new consoles are doing that seems interesting is that they use a huge pool of unified RAM (rather than two independent pools of main+video memory).

The hardware on a PS4 Pro or an Xbox One X is pretty anemic CPU-compute wise compared to what you could build for near the same cost.

Something like a $190 Ryzen 3600 on a $100 motherboard. Add RAM and a small low cost SSD, or just do network boot/PXE. Total cost might be somewhat more than buying a PS4 Pro but it would run circles around it in any cpu intensive application.

You can install Linux on modern PS4 - failoverflow team managed to get it running. With 3d support even.

See their 33c3 presentation on how they did it. It's filled with great details on how PS4 differs from PCs: https://youtu.be/-AoHGJ1g9aM

The Xbox One already runs UWP apps. But I guess not Win32 or a standard Windows desktop?

If you count using an external HD valid, you can install Arch or Fedora on PS4 right now if you can still find one with a FW not higher that 5.05/5.07...

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