Let’s be honest, we’ve all been here. You had that one laptop that could run every task comfortably and just cruise through anything you threw at it. After a while, you open a few tabs, maybe Spotify in the background, maybe Discord, maybe a lightweight game you know, and suddenly the fans sound like they’re trying to take off. The laptop still works, but it doesn’t feel capable anymore. Just tired.

When we talk about how far Linux has come with PC gaming, we often cover the performance and compatibility aspects. After all, it's easy to get excited when CachyOS begins taking wins versus Windows 11 on some big titles. However, there are still issues with getting mods to work with your games on Linux, especially if they require DLLs.

When I made the move from Windows to Linux, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I knew I was moving into a whole new ecosystem, and I had an idea as to what I wanted to test out, but other than that, I had no idea what I was getting into. So, I just sort of jumped in and gave Linux a try.

The usefulness of most AI tools is questionable, but some of this emerging tech actually comes in handy. Claude Code is one of those. I have been using it for months, and it still surprises me with how it pulls off certain tasks. The problem is that it runs out of credits far too quickly, which means you end up waiting more than you’d like. And since it’s closed source, you can’t really trust what’s going on underneath (although the recent source code leak did reveal a few interesting things).

For the longest time, Windows users never really had a lot of choices when it came to their file manager. Sure, there have been a couple of niche file managers that programmers and power users have sworn by for a couple of decades now, but today, every kind of user is spoilt for choice.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the ups and downs of AI, follow Stevie Bonifield. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it startedMost people probably know Grammarly for its browser extension that suggests how to spruce up your emails, but over the past few years, it's been eyeing bigger ambitions. In October, the company formerly known as Grammarly made a public pivot to rebrand as an AI company called Superhuman. The new name was adopted from Superhuman Mail, an AI email platform that Grammarly acquired i …Read the full story at The Verge.

For me, one of the most interesting ways of exploring retro tech is imagining if the sequence of inventions was different than what we experienced in real life. For instance, what if we managed to figure out how to get LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini up and running before we went through the Y2K bug scare?

Self-hosted open-source tools have replaced a bunch of cloud-based platforms for my productivity needs. Take Microsoft 365, for example. I’d rather not spend extra bucks every month just to edit documents when there’s a battalion of tools available in the FOSS ecosystem. Like most tinkerers, I’d initially chosen a local LibreOffice instance as my Microsoft 365 replacement. But as the devices in my tinkering arsenal increased, I switched to a Docker-based LibreOffice Online instance to access my spreadsheets, presentation slides, and text documents.

Over the years, I’ve built (and disassembled) dozens of projects with my Raspberry Pi, but a retro gaming machine has got to be one of my favorites. Sure, this tiny single-board computer may not have enough processing capabilities to emulate PlayStation 2 and newer consoles, but it’s great at handling games designed for ancient gaming machines and slightly modern-ish systems.

For a long time, I treated my Raspberry Pi setup like the ideal home lab foundation. One board handled DNS, another ran a few Docker containers, and a third picked up whatever task I didn’t want to disturb elsewhere. I devoted a fourth to Jellyfin media streaming. It felt tidy in theory, and there was definitely some charm in seeing several tiny machines humming along together. But after living with that setup for a while, I started noticing that the cluster was giving me more overhead than payoff.

When I’m deep in research, I usually have twenty tabs open. After a while, the favicons disappear and Chrome leaves me with a row of anonymous gray slivers. This was my daily frustration with Chrome for years. Whether I was working on a 32-inch Windows desktop or trying to stay productive on a 14-inch MacBook Pro, the horizontal tab bar remained the ultimate bottleneck.

When I grabbed the first-generation Amazon Echo Plus for $180, I planned to make it my smart home hub. It handled my first-generation Philips Hue smart bulbs perfectly for a year. Then it just stopped. No automation worked. Routines quit mid-cycle. Online forums suggested looking into the “connectivity issues” and simply pointed to buying the latest model.