not in the form it was originally.
what I don't get is why noone ever tried to make a console user interface in the style of something like PS Home. imaging if the dashboard of the Series X or PS5 was just one big MMO, and you start in your apartment which you can customize, you can just open a menu to use the console like any other system, but close that menu and you are instantly in this enviroment... if you join a party you automatically are transported into the apartment of the party leader... stuff like that.
walk out of your apartment and you are in a PS Home like environment with minigames, places to chat etc.
with the fast SSDs of the current consoles they would have been more achieveable than ever imo
Well, when you only have 2 GB - 2.5 GB for the OS, which would include all OS UI graphical assets, not to mention a single core with two threads for those same UI assets, it would be tricky at best. Especially if you want any type of genuine fidelity while still having your actual game and apps running in the background.
Technically, I suppose a system could write out the state of open applications to the SSD and swap out data in memory for such a PS Home-style OS interface. Or, active game and app content can be compressed into some space in RAM instead of writing it out to storage, but I think you'd still need to write out to storage at least once and then compress that data to write it back into RAM so that when the user swaps back to the game, the data is already in RAM it just needs to be decompressed and written back into RAM again. Or you could have some combination of both approaches.
The question is if it'd be fast enough to be fluid, especially for users constantly going between the game and accessing various OS features. I don't
think the Series consoles have SSD I/O fast enough to pull that off. Even with PS5's much faster SSD I/O, I think it is probably too slow to allow that fully seamless type of transition between a running game application to a PS Home-style user interface, considering all the data swapping, compressing, and decompressing that'd have to happen between the CPU, RAM, decompression I/O, flash memory controller, and SSD. There's also a natural latency too, and again, you'd need more than 2 GB or 2.5 GB for a "next gen" style PS Home GUI, even if you compressed those assets in that space.
Though again, I guess you could do some type of combination, like have some of those assets in the OS-reserved space, some others uncompressed on the SSD in some reserved space, others still compressed on SSD. Even though you'd still need to write out the state of the running game to storage (because the PS Home-style GUI needs that RAM space (as well as the GPU and CPU resources) when accessing the OS UI), at least this way it could be a bit more seamless or give the perception of being seamless.
By "seamless" I mean transitions that are one second or less going between the game to a PS Home-style GUI for the OS. Which is why I kind of rule the Series systems out of it; you'd want a similar RAM footprint to do such a thing on those systems but their storage, while fast, doesn't seem fast enough (I mean "speed" in both bandwidth and latency terms) to give a seamless type of transition. You'd probably get something like 2-3 second transitions in those cases, which could make that type of system experience feel choppy.
Once we get to 10th-gen consoles we should have enough RAM capacity, fast enough storage and beefy enough decompression data I/O (as well as enough spare cores & threads for the CPU(s) and space graphics processing for the GPU) to where implementing some next-gen fully featured PS Home-style GUI interface for the OS should be doable and 100% seamless without needing to constantly write out active game/app content states to storage (saving on endurance cycles of the NAND chips in the SSD).
