The Steam Machine was a very exciting piece of hardware when it was first announced last year. The idea of a compact PC that can live in my living room and run most modern games is excellent, and I'd be more on board with it than with a typical desktop PC.

Don't get me wrong; gaming on Linux has come a long way in the last few years. A decade ago, getting any game running on Linux that wasn't designed natively for it was a massive headache at best and impossible at worst. Now, thanks to the efforts from several sources, such as Valve with Proton, it seems like 2026 may be the year of gaming on Linux after all.

Wi-Fi 7 might be the hotness right now, but it's (mostly) marketing fluff unless your home network is up to the task. It was built for a speed bump over Wi-Fi 6E, and in order to take full advantage, you'll want multi-gig wired networking as well. Which makes upgrading more expensive, but as someone who's recently upgraded his wireless network, there's a hidden cost that nobody is really talking about.

I've spent the better part of the last few years defending technologies like DLSS. I think I just might continue doing that, because when it works, it really works. It turns otherwise unplayable games into smooth, responsive experiences without completely butchering image quality. It felt like a smart compromise instead of a shortcut.

Besides its centralized storage and backup provisions, my Network-Attached Storage is an important part of my self-hosted setup. I’ve mapped a bunch of FOSS tools to use SMB and NFS shares for their volumes (and yes, it’s not very complicated to pull this off even on unprivileged containers). Heck, I’ve even deployed a bunch of applications on my NAS server, as, unlike my experimental Proxmox workstations, my storage server remains operational 24/7 without the shadow of my wacky experiments looming over it.

Google's entrance into AI was…interesting. Bard was, well, a mess and clearly a rushed response to ChatGPT. Now, I typically believe first impressions certainly can be the last impressions. I typically live by that in my personal life and it also extends to tech. However, and I don't say this lightly, Google might be the single biggest exception to that rule.

If you've used a Wayland-based Linux operating system, you'll know that windows that you close don't reappear where they were when a session ends, such as after a crash or a logout. It's been a long-standing problem, so much so that a fix for this unwanted behavior has been worked on for six years now.

There's something about the ESP32 that makes people want to make really cute devices with it. Earlier this month, we saw someone build a little desk companion that demands pets, and now, someone else is showing off their latest project: a small, disk-shaped device you can speak to, which responds in kind with text and facial expressions. And it's just so cute.

I'll be honest, when I first started using HDR on my LG C8 OLED, it didn't look nearly as good as it did in the showroom. Sure, it looked better than SDR, but not in the way I expected. Highlights didn't pop as much, and the overall image just didn't have that "wow" factor. But I knew the problem wasn't the panel itself because it's an OLED display after all, so I decided to mess with the picture settings.

KaOS, a 12-year partner of KDE Plasma, shook the Linux world last month after it dropped the desktop environment in exchange for Niri and Noctalia. The development team cited issues with systemd and stated that, because "Plasma pretty much demands Systemd," it would be scrapping Plasma in exchange for Niri. Now, the dev team has begun dismantling systemd from KaOS, and while it's not completely gone yet, the team is making progress.

Slop yourself. | Image: Suno Suno just released one of its biggest updates yet with v5.5 of its AI music model. Where previous updates focused mostly on improving fidelity and creating more natural vocals, v5.5 is about giving users more control. It includes three new features: Voices, My Taste, and Custom Models.In the release notes, Suno says that Voices is its most requested feature. It lets users train the vocal model on their own voice. They can upload clean accapellas, finished tracks with backing music, or just sing directly into the mic on their phone or laptop. The cleaner and higher quality the recording, the less data is required. And to prevent someone fro …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's been nearly two years since the last LTS release of Ubuntu, but soon it will be time for another. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is expected to release in April, and it comes with some big changes if you've been holding on to the previous LTS version.