Gaming on Linux has come a long, long way over the past few years, but it's still not perfect. It's dang close, and Linux is catching up to Windows, but it's not perfect. The good news is that the open-source community is working very hard at ironing out those last bits of resistance that keep games on Linux from working as well as they do on Windows.

The Studio Display looks great next to a MacBook, but its aging display technology holds it back. | Photo by John Higgins / The Verge For the better part of 12 years, Apple owned the 5K monitor world - primarily because it made basically the only options. LG's 5K UltraFine was a solid, if bland choice, but many people bought a 27-inch iMac from 2014 for its 5K screen alone. Then in 2022, Apple finally gave the people what they wanted by releasing the $1,599 Studio Display (which was essentially the iMac's screen as a separate monitor with a webcam and speakers) and removed the LG from its store.It wasn't until late 2024 that companies like BenQ and Asus finally began releasing their own 27-inch 5K monitors. And while the Studio Display was the best built and best looking …Read the full story at The Verge.

I was an early adopter of the Steam Deck, and I love it dearly for how it changed the way I think about playing through my Steam library. Part of that was untethering myself from the desk I spend most of my waking hours at, but also because of how fluid SteamOS feels to use. I love it so much that I've tried running it on my other AMD-powered handhelds in the past, and have always switched back to Windows after being disappointed that one feature or another didn't work.

Sony’s new flagship doesn’t look much like its predecessors. | Image: Sony / The Verge Sony's Xperia 1 flagships have looked more or less the same since 2020, but that's finally changing with the Xperia 1 VIII, which moves to a chunky square camera island. The phone also boasts what should be a substantially improved telephoto camera, along with an AI camera assistant that looks like an improved version of Google's Camera Coach.While every previous Xperia 1 phone has had three vertical cameras, and the last six have positioned them in the same top-left corner spot, the 1 VIII mixes things up. The three lenses are now laid out in a square block, together with the flash and a Sony logo, that's raised from the phone but slopes …Read the full story at The Verge.

Who, me? | Image: The Verge; Getty Images After two weeks of hearing from assorted witnesses that he was a lying snake, the jury finally heard from the lying snake himself: Sam Altman. At the end of the testimony, his lawyer William Savitt asked him how it felt to be accused of stealing a charity."We created, through a ton of hard work, this extremely large charity, and I agree you can't steal it," Altman said. "Mr. Musk did try to kill it, I guess. Twice." Altman was fully in "nice kid from St. Louis" mode, and did a passable impression of a man who was bewildered at what was happening to him. When he stepped down from the stand holding a stack of evidence binders, he even look …Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon's head of devices and services, Panos Panay, says that the company is "not necessarily" planning to release a smartphone, but has stopped short of denying it outright. It was previously reported that Amazon is developing an Alexa-enabled AI phone codenamed "Transformer," more than 10 years after it scrapped its ill-fated Fire Phone.Speaking to the Financial Times, Panay was asked directly if the company was planning another smartphone. "It's just not the goal," he replied. "I know there's a lot of rumors out there.""I think your black and white question is, are you going after a phone? A lot of people want me to say no, but a lot …Read the full story at The Verge.

I’ve been running Dungeons and Dragons campaigns since I was 12 years old. While I won’t dare utter how many years have passed since then, I will say that it all started with the second edition of D&D. When I was a kid, I had endless hours to churn out pages of campaigns and could dwell on the endless encounters my adventurers would face. As an adult, I no longer have the luxury of such meanderings.

Ever since I bought the Alienware AW3423DW and AW2725DF OLED monitors for my multi-monitor setup, I've always had a hard time switching back to my LG LCD for gaming, even though it's a higher resolution panel. I'd still happily use it for regular desktop work because it's brighter and sharper, but when it came to gaming, I'd only really use it if I wanted to experience a game at 4K. Then again, resolution alone wasn't enough to make up for weaker contrast, IPS glow, and slower pixel response times.

It's a good idea to never sleep on workstation releases. While you might not find them as exciting as a new gaming PC, these models act as the backbone for the modern workforce and could end up being what you use to perform your day-to-day job. The good news is that Lenovo is doing impressive things within its ThinkStation and ThinkPad ranges, including bringing some claimed world firsts to market.

I had a weekend, a 7800X3D paired with an RTX 5080, and a question I wanted answered honestly: can a locally hosted coding model actually finish a real agentic project from start to finish? I, myself, am no software engineer, but I was extremely curious as to how far I could push a coding agent like Claude Code, both in a capability sense and a censorship sense. Asking it to code a cheat for Minecraft, the bones of which are quite old, didn't get me very far initially, but the swap to a local AI removed the shackles.

At its peak, the Androscoggin paper mill in Jay, Maine, a rural town about 67 miles northwest of Portland, employed about 1,500 people - until a pulp digester exploded in 2020, forcing the mill to close permanently. In 2023, the 1.4 million-square-foot facility was purchased through a joint venture by JGT2 Redevelopment and a number of other holding and capital companies. The project is led by developer Tony McDonald. Over the next three years, McDonald and his team broke down the mill's machinery and shipped it to Pakistan, and worked to clean up the industrial site for resale. That resale agreement was finalized earlier this year, accord …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Wilhelm Scream is one of those weird examples of sounds you've likely heard a million times before, but you had no idea it had a name. But it does have a name, and as soon as you know what the Wilhelm Scream sounds like, you'll never stop hearing it in TV shows, movies, and video games.