Dredging up an old thread...mostly because all the topics I care to discuss are already open in this one.
I've had my 80GB PS3 (the newest version with only two USB ports...dammit) for a few months now, and so far, it kicks (a little bit of) ass. I don't even own a game for it yet! Rock Band will likely be my first big game purchase...it just looks too fun not to have. I wanted PS2 compatibility, but I was unwilling to spend the extra $200 to get incomplete backward compatibility. So, I got the middle-of-the-road version.
The DVD/BlueRay player works great. The picture is very sharp, the sound is great, and I have zero complaints about it. The game demos have been fun to download and try. Nothing has really stood out enough to buy, but I like being able to pretend I have a game for my game console.
Linux has been underwhelming. I was REALLY excited about the "Other OS" option, but the lack of support from Sony is quite frustrating. On one hand, I understand the need to keep some proprietary features. On the other hand, it'd be way cool to have full hardware access and see what the open source community could drum up. I don't mind that a PC-type OS is slow on a gaming console, but the lack of drivers (largely driven, I suspect, by Sony's tight-lipped act) for Bluetooth and wireless makes it a PITA. I think I'm among VERY few to ever have PS3 Linux working with sound, WPA wireless, AND Bluetooth simultaneously. I thought the latest Ubuntu 8.10 release would fix a lot of the driver issues, but I still had to find a workaround to make Bluetooth useful, and WPA is still broken unless you do some pretty ugly kernel hacking. I did manage to get the thing working as a makeshift networked media center, but it's a tad unreliable, and I HATE having to re-key my PS3 controller every time I boot back into the game OS. It's been fun to toy with Linux, but unless things improve drastically, it's largely useless (on the PS3).
I REALLY wanted to use the PS3 as a media client connected to a large, networked hard drive full of music, video, and pictures. Until today, I was just messing with NFS and connecting through Xubuntu or Ubuntu Linux on the PS3. It was pretty clunky except for Amarok's ability to share a database across the network for music and playlists. Today I found
FUPPES. Cool! Now I can play my music collection from the game OS (along with pics and vids)! It took a bit of tweaking, using a desktop machine running Linux Mint Felicia as the server, but it's really working well. Once again, Sony has let me down a bit, though. The PS3's playlist support SUCKS...BIGTIME. A viable workaround used some Bash scripting to parse my .m3u playlists and create a folder for each playlist containing soft links to all the songs. I can navigate to a folder with the links (shortcuts), and hit "Shuffle" to emulate a playlist. I was even able to get FUPPES to stream DVD content from a networked DVD drive (not that it's particularly useful, but it was kinda neat-o).
Anyway...I like my PS3, but Sony really needs to pony up some "Other OS" support as well as some more robust firmware before I'll be truly happy with it.