Although we talk a lot about homelab and network setups here at XDA, we know that it can be intimidating if it's your first time diving in. While building your own is going to be the best option, prebuilt models are going to provide a turnkey solution that's going to be less frustrating out of the gate.

Microsoft's handheld offerings are in a really embarrassing position right now. For third-party handhelds+, people are scrapping Windows 11 in favor of other operating systems, such as Steam and Bazzite, citing a better experience and in-game performance. For official Microsoft-branded handhelds...people still find that Linux does it better. Yes, Microsoft can't seem to catch a break, even on its home turf.

Making the jump from Windows to Linux is a pretty daunting task. There are some things you have to learn, and others to unlearn, and ideally, you should start off with a distro that's as close to the Windows experience as possible. That way, you can spend some time testing out the waters and checking out the nuances without having to fight the UI.

Once you dive into the world of PoE networks and devices, you're never going to look back. And it would be an understatement to say that we're fans of the tech at XDA. While there are many different benefits to having a PoE network, one of the reasons that always comes up is being able to eliminate cable clutter.

As someone deeply invested in the self-hosting hobby and space, Docker has become my go-to tool to keep up with interesting apps and services. The reasons are obvious. It makes it incredibly easy to get started with new services using stacks. Moreover, it makes it easy to remove old ones and rebuild your environment as your needs evolve. But while the rest of my Docker environment might keep evolving, there's one Docker container that stays a constant for me. That's Portainer. I run it on my Synology NAS, and it has become the anchor point to keep my self-hosted workflow organized. Portainer makes Docker simpler, safer and, honestly, predictable. All of that becomes surprisingly important when your NAS is running apps for work, backups and automation. Moreover, as someone who is generally short on time, the predictability of Portainer goes towards making sure that it is the one container that keeps running at all times on my home server.

After trying a wide range of note-taking apps and project managers this year, I’ve naturally started drifting away from Notion. One of the tools that took its place is Microsoft Loop. I keep it in a pinned tab in my browser so it’s always there and ready for me to drop notes and tasks into. Although Notion has far more powerful features, I’m after convenience, and Loop just gives me way more of that. It requires less maintenance, is very minimal, and is beyond easy to navigate. Less really is more in this case, but that doesn’t mean Loop is lacking - it still gives me everything I need to keep my notes and projects organized and structured. And it’s replaced a big chunk of what I used Notion for…

It’s no secret that Elon Musk shapes the X social platform and X’s “maximally truth-seeking” Grok AI chatbot to his preferences. But it’s possible Musk may have needed a bit of an extra ego boost this week, because Grok’s worship of its creator seems, shall we say, more noticeable than usual.As a number of people have pointed out on social media over the past day, Grok’s public-facing chatbot is currently prone to insisting on Musk’s prowess at absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely — or conversely, embarrassing — a given feat is.Elon Musk: fitter than LeBron James!Elon Musk: funnier than Jerry Seinfeld!Elon Musk: better at resurrection than Jesus Christ!Elon Musk: surpasses most historical figures in active paternal involvement despite scale!Elon Musk: could beat Mike Tyson by “deploying gadgets” in a boxing match! Elon Musk: would beat Superman too! Elon Musk: would “automate away the need for killers via sustainable tech” but be “unstoppable” at murder, if he tried!If pressed, Grok will also contend Musk would be the best at eating poop or drinking urine, but it would prefer to focus on how good he is at making rockets, please. At least some of these posts have been deleted in the past hour; X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the phenomenon from The Verge.This glazing appears to be exclusive to the X version of Grok; when I asked the private chatbot to compare Musk with James, it conceded, “LeBron James has a significantly better physique than Elon Musk.” The GitHub page for Grok’s system prompts indicates they were updated three days ago, with the additions including a prohibition on “snarky one-liners” and instructions not to base responses on “any beliefs stated in past Grok posts or by Elon Musk or xAI,” but there’s nothing that seems to clearly explain this new behavior — although system prompts are only one way to shape how AI systems work.Either way, this is far from the weirdest Grok has gotten, and it’s less disruptive than the bot’s brief obsession with “white genocide” or its intense antisemitism — which, incidentally, is still flaring up in the form of Holocaust denial. Grok has previously searched for Musk’s opinion to formulate its own answers, so even the preoccupation with Musk isn’t new. But it reminds us all what a weirdly intimate connection Grok — a product that’s been rolled out across the US government, among other places — has with its owner, and how randomly that connection is prone to appear.

It seems Microsoft is in a charitable mood right now. Just over a month ago, we saw the company make its own 80s operating system open-source, which was a huge boon for people interested in preserving information technology history. As it turns out, it wasn't done with just that.

Arc Raiders is absolutely ruling the Steam charts right now, and its 700K+ concurrent PC players certainly don't seem like they have any plans of stopping. Now, the game has brilliantly emergent gameplay, accessible extraction-shooter mechanics, and a solid roadmap, but there's something else that it's becoming rapidly popular for — the wholesome player base.

I started off self-hosting on my main PC as a way to get familiar with the concepts. But as I wanted to access my self-hosted services around the clock, I started moving my favorite apps to my NAS. I quickly learned that while I was using Docker containers on both my Windows desktop and my Synology NAS, they work very differently in practice.

Well, it turns out that Microsoft doesn't know why people dislike Windows' new direction. If you're just tuning in, the company announced that it's moving to make Windows an agentic operating system, which is when AI does most of the decision-making and heavy lifting. The company thought that people would love Copilot handling their PC for them, but the reality was a little jarring.

While many of the headlines throughout the 2020s have been dominated by GPUs and their ongoing tribulations with stock, a new pricing catastrophe is currently hitting the PC hardware space, and it's the pricing of DRAM. DRAM is the ultra-fast dynamic memory that you find on things like system memory and VRAM in consumer PCs, but it's also used in higher-bandwidth configurations for data center applications. With the memory demands of AI ever-increasing, and the yield of high-speed DRAM being questionable, consumers like me are left questioning the upgrades and standalone builds we had planned for the future.