Look, okay, I know I've gone on record for betting on 2026 being the year of gaming on Linux, and I still stand by that prediction. But if you asked me to make a guess as to how the Linux kernel will evolve to help gamers move to the open-source platform, "adding support for a plastic guitar controller for the PS4 and PS5" would be way down the list. And yet, the open-source community has delivered. A recent git pull has revealed that someone has been working hard to add Rock Band 4 support to the Linux 7.0 kernel, and the best bit is that the pull has already been merged.

There is a weird mismatch between who has an expensive Adobe subscription and who actually needs one. Most people on the All Apps plan never touch half of what they’re paying for - this used to be me as well. And even among Premiere Pro subscribers, though most people use it professionally, a surprising number don’t need the pro features Adobe offers.

Windows 11 is packed with useful tools that are hidden out of sight, and Windows Sandbox is a perfect example. It's a handy feature that needs to first be manually enabled in system settings, so a lot of people are unaware of its existence or never take the time to figure out what it can offer them. If you're running Windows 11 Pro and haven't yet enabled Windows Sandbox, you're missing out on a wonderful feature that'll enhance the security of your system.

Building a PC might feel second nature after you've gone through multiple builds, but we've all been first-timers at some point. Building your first PC can be a bit stressful. It may take longer than necessary as you second-guess yourself at every step. You may remember yourself backtracking more than once to fix something you did wrong. You may even have been unaware of some things that seem obvious to you today. From installing RAM and SSDs to changing BIOS settings, it's natural not to be on top of things during your first time. Practice makes perfect, and the stuff that seemed confusing at first becomes obvious by the time you're building your second PC. So, let's go through 6 things that you probably didn't know about during your first build.

I advocate setting up effective backup tools for everyone. It makes a lot of sense if you value your personal data. But, I hate to admit that I myself have procrastinated about backing up portions of my digital life. My photos and videos living on my NAS, get backed up to another NAS, sure. But my documents, and working files, not so much. I've been looking for something simple, free, capable of running on my Mac and NAS that would simplify the process dramatically. That's where Kopia comes in.

It has been an incredible year for Wayland fans already. We've already seen a few teams, from desktop environment developers to operating system maintainers, put Wayland in the spotlight in some manner. Some teams are making Wayland the default option, while others are scrapping X11 altogether.

Gamers are always trying to squeeze out the most performance from their hardware, especially in competitive titles. Every frame and every extra millisecond of latency can make the difference, and even in titles where it's not as serious, nobody is going to complain about extra FPS. DLSS is great at providing extra frames at the slight cost of visual fidelity, and for most games, this is a net positive, but it's not necessarily the "future" of PC gaming. It's already here, and it's good. The real future of gaming is asynchronous reprojection, a technology that promises much lower latency and a smooth experience regardless of framerate.

This isn’t one for the squeamish. | Image: Metrograph Pictures Let me just say that I highly recommend you go into Possession blind. Don't watch a trailer. Don't even finish reading this. Go watch it now over on Shudder, Criterion, or Metrograph. It's also available through Kanopy or Hoopla if your library provides access. Then come back so we can talk about it in the comments. Though this probably isn't one for the squeamish.Warning: Spoilers ahead.Possession is the sort of film that, even if you've had the whole plot spoiled for you, can be difficult to follow. After watching it twice, listening to three different podcasts, and reading multiple articles about it, I'm still not 100 percent sure wha …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's something about using hardware to generate a map of the room it's in to be really interesting. A while ago, I covered someone using a Raspberry Pi to make a full LiDAR system, and since then, I've been keeping an eye out for other projects that allow people to map out a room using something similar.

We've covered plenty of cool ESP32 gaming projects in the past, including a recent one where someone made a cool augmented reality project with one. But usually these projects use something else alongside the ESP32 to get the full experience. What if we had a game that used nothing but the ESP32? Well, someone has created a cool pseudo-3D racing game that runs entirely off the chip, and you can give it a try for yourself.

There are quite a few things you need to go over to justify a CPU upgrade. The architecture, the base clock frequency, the IPC, and perhaps most significantly, the economics. The consumer hardware industry has found itself in the middle of one of the worst inflation cycles in history, thanks to the ever-increasing demand from the AI sector, and that's why every upgrade is being rethought.

One of the existential questions when self-hosting services is how to make it easier to connect to them without having to remember individual ports and IP addresses. You could use tunnels to proxy individual services, or remote access tools like Tailscale, but one of the most elegant solutions is to use a reverse proxy. Think of this as a phone directory for your apps, letting you use your own domain name and subdomains to access them, with traffic routed to the right place.