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Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

what's the advantage of a jail broken ps4? Other than running 3rd party Linux binaries, and maybe adding ad-blockers, is there a gaming benefit?

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Check out the Switch or PS3 scenes for some examples: save backups and save editing, game mods, overclocking, normally unsupported game controllers.

The Switch is a good example - afaik there's still no official way to back up saves for a lot of games (botw included), and for the ones where cloud saves are supported it's still a monthly subscription. Your console dies, you lose your saves, no way around it other than jailbreaking.

The Switch hacking scene is also a good example just because of the sheer amount of effort poured into it - Atmosphere, the primary custom-firmware solution, is aiming to be a _full reimplementation_ of the Switch's firmware, kernel and all.

https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere/

https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesospher...

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(also, one more particularly cool application made possible through homebrew is game streaming - from a desktop pc or other device.)

https://github.com/rock88/moonlight-nx

Additionally cloud saves are not supported on some games, including single-player first-party games, and Nintendo's excuse for that is because "cheating."

Animal Crossing and all four (technically two but you know) Pokemon games have no cloud save support at all, arguably all games for which players would absolutely want cloud saves. On top of this is a pretty long list of third-party titles.

Running homebrew, although I don't know if there's much of a homebrew scene for the ps4.

Also you can get a second hand ps4 pretty cheap nowadays relative to it's hardware and power consumption - could make a decent home server if you chucked some variety of linux on there (is there much support for the hardware?)

PS4 is basically a PC at this point one of the main reasons for why no homebrew scene.

Piracy, I assume?

Running linux, ps4 is based on FreeBSD

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