Linux now Officially Available for PlayStation 5

Hot on the heels of the news of Sony’s new DRM that earned significant community backlash, Andy Nguyen, the developer who previously showed off running a full Linux installation on a PlayStation 5, has officially published their methodology and necessary steps to get the open-source operating system running on Sony’s console. The hack requires a PS5 disc version running firmware version 3.00, 3.10, 3.20, 3.21, and 4.00, 4.02, 4.03, 4.50, 4.51, and there is only support for the M.2 drive in the 4.XX versions at the time of writing. There are supposedly ways to downgrade the PS5 firmware to one of the versions that still supports the hack, but those may not always work reliably. If you’ve followed the jailbreak steps, injected the payload and rebooted back into Linux, you should be greeted by a full Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Raccoon installation, replete with the Linux kernel 7.

Interestingly, the PS5 Linux installation is quite full-featured, replete with custom VRAM allocation, fan control, and a boost mode toggling—all from within the terminal or a text file, of course. There are some caveats, and driver development is still ongoing—wireless networking, for example, may require you to manually restart the WLAN adaptor to work. The Sony DualSense controllers also don’t currently work via the built-in dongle, although they do with an external dongle. The output refresh rate is also limited to 60 Hz across 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions, although 120 Hz may be added later. The biggest limitation, however, is that it is a soft mod, meaning that if you restart the PS5 while in the Linux desktop, it will not boot back into the environment unless you apply the same jailbreak again. The upside of that is that the PlayStation 5’s base OS isn’t affected by the Linux installation, so if you want to go back to using it as a regular PS5, you can just reboot.