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As the PlayStation Network is set to recover from the worst outage in the history of the service, there’s been a lot of talk about the feature this whole debacle started over. In the early days, one of the distinctive features Sony touted of the PlayStation 3 was its Other OS option, the ability to install operating systems such as Linux on your system. With the advent of the PS3 Slim, Sony removed this functionality, setting off a terrible chain reaction. First, the homebrew community managed to bring it back, which almost immediately opened the floodgates for hackers to destroy public matches on the PlayStation Network. Thereafter, Sony pursued litigation against modders looking to jailbreak PS3s, which led hacking groups like Anonymous to launch even more attacks on the PSN. It’s a complicated debate with valid points on both sides, but there’s no end in sight for gamers who have been written off as “collateral damage” by Anonymous. Given how few people actually ran Linux on PS3, it seems most don’t know what the feature they’re arguing about actually did. This installment of the G-Spot chronicles this ultimate irony: that one of the most lamentedly lost features on the PlayStation 3 wasn’t even worth keeping around to begin with. (more…)