Most people use ChatGPT as a high-speed Google replacement, and for a long time, I was one of them. I spent months fighting with generic responses, convinced that the AI revolution was more hype than substance.

When we discuss operating systems here at XDA, we're usually covering the big three: Windows, macOS, and Linux. However, those aren't the only OSes out there. For instance, ReactOS is a Windows clone that uses none of the major OSes as its base and is its own thing.

ESP32 projects come in all shapes and sizes. Some are useful tools, some solve a problem with an existing product or solution, and some of them are just plain fun. The microcontroller is a really powerful piece of kit, so you'll often find it in all sorts of homebrewed projects that crop up on the internet every week.

If 2025 was all about Microsoft adding features (including Copilot) to all of its apps, then 2026 seems to be the year where Microsoft begins rolling back those features (including Copilot) to a more sensible level. We've already seen the company go back to the drawing board with Windows 11 as it pulls back on Copilot's integration while also working on core parts of the OS, like File Explorer.

OpenAI's Codex, as evident by the name, is a tool that's primarily built for... developers. It's designed to write code, fix bugs, review pull requests, help you build tools and automations, and handle the kind of repetitive engineering work that eats into deep focus time. It competes with tools like anti, Google's AI Studio and Antigravity, OpenCode, and others.

You've just finished a high-end build with an RTX 50 series GPU and a 360 mm all-in-one cooler. You should be expecting ice-cold temps, but for some reason your CPU is hitting 85°C at idle. What have you actually done wrong here? You might automatically think that the culprit is a bad thermal paste application or a faulty pump, but in reality it's a single fan fighting against the rest of the system.

Having attempted everything from running Hackintosh instances inside virtual machines to running hypervisors within virtualization environments, I’m no stranger to wacky home lab projects. Heck, I’ve tried running Windows 11 as a VM across a bunch of Proxmox nodes, with each experiment teaching me new tweaks to turn a mere virtual machine into something that can run everyday tasks.

The mobile chip market is a competitive one, and there's such little room for a chip to be a poor offering. AMD's Krackan Point refresh, Gorgon Point, is stuck in a bit of a no-mans-land. Zen 6 isn't ready, and the Ryzen AI 300 chips were a bit underserved, so taking a second swing using the same architecture makes sense. The execution, however, doesn't.

We've always joked about how powerful smartphones are becoming, with modern flagships rocking more RAM than desktop PCs. Even budget-friendly smartphones are incredibly powerful compared to previous-gen options.

Linux has never been so good. The Steam Deck put a polished Linux gaming handheld in millions of living rooms. Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Bazzite and Fedora have never been easier to install and live with. There's Zorin OS for Windows users who don't want to suffer the whiplash of a transition. And yet, for all of that momentum, there remain pockets of everyday computing where Microsoft's OS decisively wins.

Frame generation has always had a poor reputation among serious gamers, and rightfully so, largely because Nvidia presents it as a feature that fixes poor performance. Yes, it does significantly improve frame rates as Nvidia and AMD claim, but smooth performance isn't just about pushing a higher number. Your frame time consistency, input latency, and how responsive the game actually feels matter just as much, and frame generation doesn't improve any of that.

With an abundance of AI assistants out there to try, it's natural to want to figure out which ones you need and which ones you don't. Some AI tools are so good that they give their paid competitors a run for their money, while others perform so poorly that I won't even bother with the free version.