Whether you're assembling a new rig or upgrading your old powerhouse, 2025 delivered some compelling GPUs across the stack, for every use case and budget. The year brought a mix of solid entries from both NVIDIA and AMD. Amid the show of the Blackwell-powered muscle of Team Green to the value-driven RDNA 4 advancements from Team Red, we also witnessed a surprisingly robust response from Intel with its wild card entry into the market, as the chipmaker continues to win back its place in the GPU market.

A Raspberry Pi can feel like a little miracle, capable of everything from blocking ads to running smart home automations and retro games. It is still just a tiny computer, though, and it has real limits that are easy to forget once ideas start flowing. If you avoid a few common mistakes, the Pi stays fast, stable, and pleasant to work with rather than becoming a flaky box you constantly need to fix. Think of this as a checklist of what not to do, so your next project has a much better chance of just working.

As Microsoft begins to bring all of its apps under one roof, we're seeing the ones that get left outside get axed in favor of the newer, shinier apps. We're beginning to see the company introduce its best offerings under the Microsoft 365 Copilot banner, which has all the famous productivity apps and its infamous AI assistant rolled into one.

In 2023, what was then still called Twitter, open-sourced at least portions of the code that decided what it served up in your feed. But that GitHub repository is hopelessly out of date, with the vast majority of the files appearing to be from the initial upload three years ago. Elon Musk says that in seven days, he will open-source X's new algorithm and finally give people a peek behind the curtain and possibly a technical explanation as to why your feed is 90 percent rage bait.Elon has always made promises to open-source parts of X, and has followed through to at least some degree, including Grok-1 in 2024. But xAI is now on Grok-3, and …Read the full story at The Verge.

The FCC approved SpaceX's plan to launch an additional 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites on Friday. That brings the total number of satellites the company will have in orbit to around 15,000 worldwide. As part of the approval, the government is also waiving previous requirements that prevented overlapping coverage and enhanced capacity.SpaceX originally sought approval for 30,000 satellites, but for now, the FCC is only greenlighting 15,000. The company will be on a deadline, too. The government says 50 percent of the Gen2 satellites must be launched and operational by December 1st of 2028, with the rest to follow by December of 2031. But the …Read the full story at The Verge.

The best tools in a developer’s arsenal aren’t always the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. In fact, some of the most transformative utilities I have used over the past year are open-source projects or generous free-forever tiers that many people overlook.

A giant version of Lockin’s wirelessly charged V7 smart lock was a showstopper on the CES show floor. I picked Aqara's Smart Lock U400 and Roborock's Saros Rover robot vacuum as the overall best smart home gadgets from CES 2026, but there were gazillions of other great gadgets on the show floor. It was a banner year for smart home products, but the big trends I saw weren't about new product categories; they were about bringing better features and lower prices to smart home staples such as smart lighting, smart locks, cameras, and TVs. This is what I expected the launch of the interoperability protocol Matter would bring. Once companies could stop spending time and money on working on integrating with half a dozen platforms, they could fo …Read the full story at The Verge.

As Linux distros and desktop environments continue to march on, we're seeing developers take different stances on how they handle the X11 vs. Wayland problem. Some developers are keeping an X11 and a Wayland version of their software around to cater to both parties. Some are planning to get rid of X11 entirely, and others are going back to X11 with a potentially new and improved version of it.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) debuted with Windows 10 as a simpler way to run Linux distributions without needing a third-party hypervisor. WSL 2 improved its numerous shortcomings and became an easy way to run and manage multiple Linux distros on Windows. I personally use it with an Ubuntu VM running Docker for a PaperlessNGX instance with a local LLM. WSL now supports GPU passthrough, so running the local LLM by powering it with my NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU isn’t an issue.

When we first moved into this house, it was part of an ongoing development, and not every house was occupied (or even built). I wasted no time getting fiber-to-the-home installed and setting up a mesh kit with one node on each floor, thinking that would be perfectly adequate for our needs. And it was, mostly, until we started noticing odd glitches in wireless connectivity in parts of the house.

Sharing files between devices is easy thanks to cloud services, but becomes more difficult when you want an offline-first privacy-focused solution that also supports devices across different platforms.

Proton Suite has been the default recommendation for anyone serious about digital privacy. It’s a polished, all-in-one powerhouse, but it comes with a recurring price tag that adds up and an ecosystem that can feel a bit too centralized. I decided to see if I could achieve the same level of encryption and peace of mind without the monthly subscription.