Hey Joe thanx for watching my channel! Glad u enjoy
Thats some good info on the white PS3 models - mine's a CECHH. So yeah I'm not getting my hopes up that it will be easily repairable. It probably does require a "frankie" mod or something else I can't even begin to afford unfortunately... I'm still gonna pull the SYSCON codes tho just for my own curiosity and to see if I can do it (plus it will make for some pretty good Youtube content).
Concerning your question about the "best" overall distro for the PS3...
I currenty run Linux on 2 consoles: one is downgraded to FW 3.15 so supports Linux natively; the other is on Evilnat CFW so I had to use some hacks to create the Linux region on the internal HDD. Currently I'm running 3 (sometimes 4) different distros on my downgraded machine by creating 5 partitions in the drive's Linux OtherOS region (4 + 1 shared swap). Here are my thoughts on them...
Fedora 12
Runs great on the PS3 and is a joy to use. F12 software repos are still online and they are brimming with fun software to try on the console. F12 is the best distro to use if you are interested in learning hown to develop for the Cell Broadband Engine architecture. That's because IBM's Cell SDK (software development kit) packages are all installable in F12 and they all work basically flawlessly with almost no tweaking or customizations (even tho the SDK was designed for Fedora 9). All the tooling just installs via yum (the package manager) and works, no problem. Of course F12 is old as dirt, but after compiling & installing a few upgrades from source (openssl, wget, curl, git, openssh, etc), Fedora 12 can be resurrected into a very productive and usable operating system for the PS3.
Fedora 28
F28 is the very last/latest Fedora that is compatible with the PS3's ppc64 (big endian) architecture. You cannot run a newer Fedora (not without recompiling the entire OS from source RPMs). F28 runs almost as well as Fedora 12 does on the PS3, except for dnf (the package manager that replaced yum) is a bit sluggish. F28 is nice because you don't need to compile any upgrades for the software it ships with unless you really want to. All the network-facing applications still work and support all the important crypto (tls/ssl) protocols required to communicate with modern internet services and such. I have also had some success at manually installing parts of the Cell SDK in F28 and so far everything I've forced to install works just fine... this is still a work-in-progress atm tho. (The basic PPU/SPU toolchains plus libspe2 work fine and I'm in the process of getting some of the fancier math libs like alf, blas, lapack, etc to install without conflicting with the native F28 packages). Unfortunately the F28 install ISOs won't boot on the PS3 so "installation" is a bit of a hassle. I did it by building an F28 (ppc64) filesystem on my laptop (running Fedora 41 x86_64). Dnf can do this by accessing the F28 repos and installing packages to a directory you choose by using the --installroot option. After building a filesystem containing a minimal core set of packages, its simply a matter of creating a few important configs (fstab, yaboot.conf, resolv.conf, etc) and placing them in the right locations. Then you cross-compile a kernel (i'm using 6.0.19) and kernel modules, install them in the /boot and /lib/modules directories (respectively, and finally rsync the whole shebang to an empty partition on the PS3 over the network. Then re-boot the PS3 and boot into your F28 partition and it should just work!
Gentoo
Gentoo is nice on the PS3 cuz it's utterly modern (bleeding edge, in fact). Its lots of fun running a distro on a 19 yr old console with software packages that are newer than most of the ones on my modern Fedora servers. Gentoo (specifically Portage) does run a bit slower on the PS3, and the machine wasn't exactly designed for compiling massive amounts of software after all, so Gentoo is a distro that requires some patience. Certain packages will take an entire day (or more) to compile. Big offenders include gcc, cmake, librsvg2, and anything written in rust. One very nice thing about installing Gentoo on PS3 is the PS3 Gentoo Live istall ISO developed by my friend Damian. You can download the latest one here:
https://github.com/damiandudycz/gentoo-releases/tree/main/releases/ps3/23.0-lto/20250501T122500Z (install-cell-20250501T122500Z.iso). It even comes with an script to automate the whole installation. I think you have to create your own fstab & yaboot.conf after the script is done, but still, installing Gentoo on a PS3 now has never been more convenient!
Linux from Scratch
I get joy by building my own custom linux "distros" and booting them on the PS3. I'm in the process of developing my own "stage 3" archive that I can release for others to use/boot on their own PS3s.
Honorable Mentions
Two other distros that install on PS3 include Red Ribbon and Yellow Dog. I have very little experience with Red Ribbon, which is Debian based. Its the first Linux I ever got to boot on my PS3 (years ago, now). I used it for a few hours, then got bored. It has no online software repos to connect to, so it's functionality is not easily extensible. Also it ran rather slow if I rebember right. Red Ribbon is not super impressive. Yellow Dog (a Fedora/Redhat fork) is awesome on the PS3 and even shipped with an SPU toolchain for compiling programs that run on the Cell's SIMD accelerator cores. Unfortunately the online repos for Yellow Dog are long dead; also there are newer RPM based distros that work on the PS3 (Fedora) so theres not much reason to use Yellow Dog anymore currently. Unless you wanna install it for historical interest, just to experience a what was once a kick-ass powerpc Linux distro from the very eary 2000s...
That's about all I can say about Linux on PS3 in 2025. Hope you find some of this info to be of use in your own Playstation 3 Linux journey. Be sure to keep watchin' my channel! I'll be disassembling my white PS3 live on stream real soon - should be a blast
Addendum
I forgot to mention T2 Linux, probably cuz I've barely used it thus far. I have tested the latest PPC 32/64 binary ISO on my own machine and it does boot and install. However I haven't been able to figure out yet how to really use it's "package management" infrastructure. Documentation is a bit lacking here (in my opinion anyway)...
Also, most desktop environments are rather bloated for the PS3's 2-thread PPU core to handle. I've had semi-good results with Xfce in the distros I use on the console, however you will get much better performance by just using a simple window manager setup instead. Personally, I like using Openbox with a tint2 panel. Looks nice and runs nice and snappy.
Best of luck! Lmk if u need any additional info
