PCI Express 5.0 has dethroned many worthy contenders in hardware technology to become the most redundant modern feature in early 2026. It's got all the classic marketing sells, like the promise of "future-proofing", headline-grabbing throughput figures, and the mesmerizing allure of doubled bandwidth over PCIe 4.0—all while remaining functionally unnecessary across almost every real-world use case.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a piece on why people are still using Windows XP. It turned out the primary reason was support for certain legacy programs that don't work on modern versions of the OS, especially in industrial setups. But there was also a small group that still had Windows XP as their primary operating system. And web connectivity is the only reason they haven't switched yet.

Linux isn't a second-hand operating system anymore. It used to be a choice for weak hardware or hardcore enthusiasts who didn't like the direction that primary OSes like Windows or macOS were heading. Currently, a lot of Windows users are flocking to Linux, trying their hands on distros in search of something that feels familiar to their previous operating systems.

The Zenfone 12 Ultra is Asus’s latest — and perhaps final — flagship phone. Asus chairman Jonney Shih told Taiwan's Inside that the company is done making phones for now, marking the end of its Zenfone and ROG Phone lines. "Asus will no longer add new mobile phone models in the future," Shih reportedly said (translated with Google Translate). He didn't entirely rule out a return though, instead saying the company is entering a state of "indefinite observation" of the market, and that it will "continue to take care of the brand's mobile phone users."Asus's own-brand phones haven't been particularly exciting since the teeny-tiny Zenfone 10 in 2023, though its ROG Phone line has more or less been the gold standard …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you are anything like me, your self-hosting journey started with a few containers and a lot of patience. But as your stack grows from a simple media server to a complex web of ‘Arr’ apps, proxy managers, and databases, that patience starts to wear thin — specifically every time you have to run docker logs -f for the tenth time that hour.

Wine has come a long way since I last used it. The last time I gave it a try, it was around 2010, when I was trying out Ubuntu. I couldn't imagine leaving my Windows apps behind, so I just fed everything into Wine and hoped for the best. As you might imagine, things really didn't pan out, and I didn't touch Linux again until mid-2025, where I became a proper convert.

Nearly a decade on from its release, the AM4 socket continues to be relevant not just in benchmark charts, but also in sales. The CPU many consider to be the gaming GOAT, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, continued to fly off shelves this holiday season, and there's no question as to why. It's the best gaming CPU money can buy on a DDR4 platform, and seeing as basically all RAM has become prohibitively expensive for new builds and upgrades, many have turned to an older platform to save a buck.

Animal Crossing has always been anti-instant gratification. By design, you have to take your time, wait for days to pass in real time, and complete a seemingly endless list of chores to build a meaningful life with your animal friends. The slowness is part of its appeal. But with New Horizons, some of that slowness became tedious: crafting its many items one at a time, painstakingly building cliffs and rivers by hand, picking up and placing objects one by one. As I gathered when I previewed it last month, the newly released, free 3.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons addresses those issues with quality-of-life fixes that still fit t …Read the full story at The Verge.

When you want a laptop for professionals, you're really looking for something that can check two boxes: powerful and lightweight. Unfortunately, those two elements don't often come together, as the more hardware you put into a laptop to beef up its specs, the heavier it gets.

The Yakuza series took its time to catch on in the West, but with the release of some of its newer titles, it began to really make its mark on the English-speaking community. If you've been keeping up with the series, you might be interested in checking out some of the earlier titles, such as Yakuza 3 Remastered.

After launching almost three years ago, Meta's Threads is now reportedly attracting more daily mobile users than rival platform X. According to Similarweb data shared by TechCrunch, Threads has 141.5 million daily active iOS and Android global app users as of January 7th, compared to 125 million users for Elon Musk's mobile platform.Similarweb reports that Threads actually overtook X sometime between late October and early November after a consistent period of growth, meaning this milestone wasn't suddenly achieved in reaction to recent Grok-related controversies. X still has more mobile users than Threads in the US, according to Similarwe …Read the full story at The Verge.

Remote access is a powerful tool, but the options currently available leave something to be desired. RDP — Remote Desktop Protocol — is excellent in Windows-only environments, but exposing it to the web carries a pretty high degree of risk. On the other hand, VNC — Virtual Network Computing — is used by a lot of both open-source and commercial applications. While it works well across different platforms, it eats bandwidth (due to pushing raw screen updates) and doesn't offer as many features as RDP.