Yes! This is what I was driving at. Looping history back to the days of the C64, Amiga, Spectrum etc. where home tinkerers could make a massive contribution to the ecosystem. These were the gaming consoles of their day. Yes there were the NES and Atari 2600 but the popularity of something like the C64 is something that modern console vendors (especially at the PS4 price-point) should be falling over themselves for.

But realistically, how much extra would the end users be able to add? I understand those were great days and people could do a lot just by knowing where to soldier and etc. Not sure it'd work the same way tbh.

Creative tooling has come a long way in 40 years. We’ve got blender, unity, sketchup etc - even minecraft now that I think of it. I’m not talking about BASIC and assembly but basically opening up the platform for the development of this kind of tooling and charging to use it the same as they do gaming presently and controlling the distribution similarly

The PS(4) hardware and its exclusive software exist to sell each other. I don't think there is any desire to complicate that relationship from Sony's perspective.

You’re confusing Sony with Nintendo there. Sony have always been very open to third parties, albeit it in a very tightly controlled way. Would make sense to deploy their model massively

The PS3 ran Linux at the beginning. That went nowhere for Sony apart from a lawsuit when it got patched out and consoles getting racked for cheap compute at the beginning.

I don't remember the specifics apart from the GPU being inaccessible which just made it a PowerPC server. But i suspect that experience killed off the idea internally for quite a while.

Maybe it would be a last resort if the Playstation does lose out to game streaming (not that i think it will).

Sony also released Linux for the PS2 before that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2

And there was an official home-brew kit for the PS1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze

There is no such thing as a failed experiment. It sucks to be the guys who lost out when Sony decided they didn’t want to support their Linux base any more but at that stage they’d gotten what they want out of it. Sony has a history of engaging with the hobbiest community in a tight and controlled manner and their’s no reason to think they might not bring this on another notch in a later generation. Albeit in a tight and controlled fashion, but just open enough to get engagement, as is their way.

The PS4 is specifically not PC-compatible. It's a different x86-subarchitecture.

It’s all about the APIs though. PS4 is very friendly towards porting from mainstream x86