Linux desktops used to treat design as something you handled after installation finished. If the wallpaper was decent and the panel landed where your muscle memory expected it to, that was considered a win. Everything else was a pile of options, plus a quiet assumption that you would enjoy sorting them out. That era is fading fast. Today, more distros ship with a deliberate look, a consistent tone, and a clear opinion about how the desktop should feel.

Over the past year, there has been a wave of smart devices from major brands like Belkin, WeMo, and Google Nest being retired or losing cloud support. Practically overnight, expensive tech suddenly became e-waste, and those who were invested in these ecosystems might have felt like they had to start completely from scratch.

Most gamers don't even think about using integrated graphics because they already have a much more powerful discrete GPU. Once you install a graphics card, the iGPU feels redundant at best and pointless at worst. I'll admit that I had the same mindset when I used Intel CPUs in the past. Disabling the iGPU in the BIOS felt like a no-brainer, especially on a PC that I specifically built for gaming. In fact, I thought using the iGPU would unnecessarily raise CPU temps and power draw for no real benefit.

GOG recently posted a job listing for a senior software engineer focused on porting its Galaxy desktop client to Linux. Now, in reply to a Reddit AMA, the GOG team has revealed that work on native Linux support is already underway. It's still too early to give an ETA, according to the Reddit thread. But founder and CEO, Michał Kiciński, said, "personally, I'm a big fan of Linux." The job listing also calls Linux the "next major frontier" in gaming. It's obvious at this point that Linux is becoming an increasingly important part of the PC gaming landscape. Especially as Microsoft continues to frustrate users by cramming every nook and crann …Read the full story at The Verge.

When Google’s NotebookLM first dropped, it felt like magic – a dedicated AI research assistant that didn’t just chat, but truly understood my files and documents. But now Microsoft has entered the ring with Copilot Notebooks in OneNote.

After using cable, DTH, and an LG TV for years, I finally bought my first "smart" TV back in 2020. My first impression was nothing but positive, thanks to the familiar Android experience that I was used to on my phone. There was no lack of apps, and the performance was fine, but the cracks began to show within a year. The TV felt like it was struggling to perform basic navigation, and launching & switching between apps became a major snoozefest. Resetting the TV helped a few times, but I soon realized the hardware and software were just too limited. It was time to make a change, and I finally bought the Apple TV 4K in mid-2024. Arguably the best streaming box on the market, it transformed my TV-watching experience. The responsive UI, reliable functionality, and privacy-focused package fit right in with my other Apple devices.

To preface this article, I need to make one thing very clear: I hate spending money. I'm a student, I work full-time, and if an opportunity ever passes me by to either make more money or save it, I will always chase it.

I'll be honest, I used to love reading NAS spec sheets. The longer the list, the better it felt. More features meant better value, right? After setting up a few NAS systems of my own and helping friends choose their first ones, that excitement wore off pretty quickly.

Even when it wasn’t failing quietly, Ubuntu was throwing truly useless errors. | Image: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge It's a complete coincidence that I installed Linux around the same time as my colleagues Nathan Edwards and Stevie Bonifield. A few months ago, I decided to breathe new life into a 2019 Dell XPS 15 that had been collecting dust for a couple of years. Despite its (at the time) high-end Core i7 CPU and 32GB of RAM, Windows was frustratingly slow on it. The fan was constantly at full throttle even when the machine was idle, and it regularly failed to install updates. So in early 2024, I gave up and switched to an M1 MacBook Pro. But I wanted to give my oldest child something to practice typing on. Plus, I'd been trying to find a suitable di …Read the full story at The Verge.

Self-hosted AI has absolutely crossed the threshold from "fun toy" to "actually useful tool" thanks to quantized models and plugins that are surprisingly capable, even with modest hardware. Grabbing an old PC and loading a model grants you your own private AI assistant that doesn't phone home, and that's a powerful thing, but it's not the whole picture.

I had been considering building a dedicated productivity PC lately, and since I have an AM4 gaming PC, I wanted to put together a new AM5 build instead of just getting a new AM4 chip. I picked the Ryzen 9 9900X for its 12-core, 24-thread configuration and 32GB of DDR5 RAM. I used my old GTX 1660 Ti for GPU duty and moved the Gen3 NVMe SSD from my main PC to the new build. The specs looked good enough for Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve, and I didn't think I'd need any major upgrades anytime soon. However, the overall performance on the Ryzen 9 9900X didn't feel like a huge upgrade over that of the Ryzen 7 5700X on my gaming PC. That's when I switched to a Gen5 SSD, and it delivered the snappy performance I was looking for.

PC components usually get outdated in a few years, at least if you listen to how new launches are marketed and how the community talks about them online. Every time a newer generation of parts comes out, anything older is treated like a bottleneck waiting to happen. For instance, once DDR5 went mainstream, people were quick to write off DDR4 as a dead platform, even though real-world performance didn't improve all that much. The same thing happens with older GPUs, which go from "good enough" to "not worth buying" almost overnight.