Today is the third anniversary of Valve’s Steam Deck, the handheld gaming PC that all but created the market for handheld gaming PCs. It was a mess to start! But three years later, The Verge has data showing how it has dominated the nascent market. While Valve told us in November 2023 that it had sold “multiple millions” of the AMD-powered handheld, we’ve never had a good glimpse at how big it is or how Windows competitors stack up… till now. It seems the Steam Deck, so far, has been bigger than all its competitors combined.Market research firm IDC uses supply chains to estimate just how many handheld gaming systems have shipped around the world, and creates spending forecasts. When I asked IDC market research analyst Lewis Ward if he’d be willing to isolate SteamOS and Windows gaming handhelds from that data, he said yes. So here are the estimated combined shipments of the Steam Deck, and the Windows-based Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw from 2022 through 2024, and an estimate for 2025:2022202320242025 (Estimate)1,620,0002,867,0001,485,0001,926,000Add it up, and that’s just under 6 million shipments in three years. One way to view that: it’s …Read the full story at The Verge.

As much as I'm ashamed to admit it, I'll come clean — I've been a hunt-and-peck typist for most of my life, even after I started writing professionally. This started to change when I picked up my first mechanical keyboard over five years ago and consciously attempted to learn touch typing last year. While the speed isn't ideal yet, I've realized that some keyboard switches are inherently better for learning how to type, mainly heavy switches.

In the past few months, I've tried a lot of file managers on both Windows and macOS, and it's made me realize how ineffective and insufficient the solutions provided by Microsoft and Apple can be. There are some great options out there for file management, and a lot of features missing from both of these tools.

Those of you who have been around in the PC hardware world for a few decades might remember the over-the-top branding of PC components, and sometimes even cringier marketing campaigns surrounding them. Well, things have changed a lot since then, but in many ways, they're still very much the same. Manufacturers still spend a lot of time coming up with product names that have a lot of fancy but empty words.

While they may be the number one choice for gamers now, it wasn’t that long ago that AMD was in some really deep trouble in the CPU space. After steadily losing ground to Intel year after year in performance, they needed to gain some more ground in multithreaded workloads, and the FX series was supposed to do just that. It was AMD’s first major architectural redesign, and hopes were high after AMD’s marketing set lofty expectations. So, what ended up happening with AMD’s FX CPUs?

If you're a fan of using AI tools to make decisions or perform research, you'll know how expensive it can be to subscribe to advanced AI models. Fortunately, it appears Microsoft is trying to win the AI race by making its in-depth AI tools free for everyone to use an unlimited number of times.

You're finally ready to leave Microsoft's ecosystem and try the dreaded Linux, but which distribution (distro) should you use? Like many things in the open source community, you have an almost abundance of choice, with heavy hitters like Ubuntu and newcomers including Pop!_OS. Although there's no wrong answer for which distro you should use as your first Linux installation, I've rounded up some of my personal favorites that should make the switch easy for Windows users.

The base of Linux and Windows users have strong arguments for their preferred operating system and software. However, some Linux tools have features that make Windows alternatives seem left in the dust. While a Windows tool may look modern and have fancy graphical effects, it doesn’t mean the feature set compares to Linux tools.

Framework, the company behind the acclaimed Framework Laptop known for its high degree of repairability and upgradability, is entering the desktop space with its first-ever mini PC. The Framework Desktop is a new mini PC that promises to deliver performance and upgradability that's unrivaled in this kind of form factor.

Gaming laptops have come a long way since they were first introduced. And while there are now plenty of great models to choose from, it's all about finding the right balance when it comes to portability, performance, and price. With that said, we think that we've found a laptop that delivers on all three criteria, thanks to this deal that knocks $400 off the original price of Acer's Predator Helios 18 laptop.

I recently switched my OS drive to a new, larger SSD so that I would stop running out of space every time a Windows 11 update came around. I had to weigh up the benefits of doing a fresh install or cloning my old drive to the new SSD — and cloning came out as the clear winner.

When it comes to the best browsers out there, everyone talks about Brave Browser as being one of the best. And why wouldn't they? It's fast ("the fastest" according to Brave themselves), it has a built-in ad-blocker, and it supports Chromium extensions. However, Brave really isn't special; there are countless other browsers that do so much more, and they truly maintain a commitment to privacy without buying into Google's Chromium monopoly that the internet has to build around.