Owners of Valve's Steam Deck have praised its sleep mode since the handheld first shipped to customers, and for good reason. The Steam Deck's sleep mode works differently from most other gaming handhelds and consoles, giving it another edge over the competition.

On Windows, applications are most commonly installed through executables downloaded from the Internet, but on Linux, that's done through packages. While packages are treated quite similarly to software you can find and install on Windows, package management can be a significant hangup for new users of Linux because of things like dependencies, distro-specific quirks, and version control.

NotebookLM is no doubt a powerful tool for AI-assisted research and note-taking, but it’s not the only option for building a context-aware knowledge system. If you’re looking for alternatives to Google that leverage your own documents to retrieve information, generate insights, provide summaries, and give suggestions, there are several productivity apps worth considering. And they each bring something a little different to the table.

The Word concepts next to the final icon on the right. Microsoft is busy rolling out new curvy and colorful new Office icons, and now it’s revealing a set of design concepts it experimented with before finalizing these new icons. Some of the concepts are radically different from what Microsoft is shipping, with design explorations for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that more closely resemble the Office for Mac icons of the past.The Word concept icons (above) include a notepad-like experiment and different ways to visualize stacks of paper, or documents. Microsoft experimented with making the Word lettering the key part of the icon, and also versions where the lettering blends in or is totally absent. Microsoft eventually settled on a design that has three horizontal bars instead of four, and it’s using versions of the icon with and without lettering.Microsoft focuses heavily on the use of cells in its existing and new Excel icons, and the concept ones rarely diverge from this. I really like the X icon though, but the rest look similar to what Microsoft landed on for the final icon.PowerPoint has always been about slides, and Microsoft experimented with a variety of ways of visualizing that for its latest PowerPoint icon. A couple of concepts focus on the lettering, turning into a ribbon-like P or a P letter with a pie chart hanging off of it. The final icon design is a lot more tame though, with a slightly more rounded and colorful take on the current PowerPoint icon.All of Microsoft’s new Office icons — including new Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, and OneNote designs — are starting to roll out across Windows and iOS at the moment. Microsoft appears to be using the versions with letters in Windows, but for iOS it’s opting for icons without the distinctive letters.What do you think? Are there any concept versions you prefer over the final designs Microsoft picked?

There was a time when budget CPUs felt truly special. Getting most of the performance of a high-end CPU at a fraction of the price allowed countless PC builders to get started on their PC journey. Today, however, "budget" CPUs remain so only in name. The value has been eroding every year, innovative features are only found on high-end chips, and even APUs don't offer the value they used to anymore — it increasingly feels like the budget segment is scheduled for deletion pretty soon.

NotebookLM is one of the few generative AI tools that has really impressed me, but this doesn't mean that it doesn't have flaws. There's a lot it does better than its competitors, including letting you set the sources you want to use.

An airplane takes off from Reagan National Airport on the ninth day of the federal government shutdown on October 9th, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. | Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images In May, The Verge reported that the US aviation system was so fragile that "the smallest disruption can throw the entire system into chaos." That disruption arrived on October 1st, when the federal government shut down over a budget dispute. Chaos has indeed ensued. More than 6,000 flights are being delayed every day, nearly twice the historical average for October according to Department of Transportation statistics. The TSA has warned of longer security lines at airports and has stopped updating real-time checkpoint information on its MyTSA app. Some major airports have even been forced to operate without air traffic control for hours at …Read the full story at The Verge.

This week, we're finally getting gaming handhelds with Xbox branding. Microsoft and Asus partnered to create and release the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, which are Steam Deck-like handhelds with a tailor-made version of Windows 11 for on-the-go PC gaming. And while no first-party Xbox games come out on the exact same day as these handhelds, the general launch window lineup is fairly strong.

I'll go out on a limb here: if you have an RTX 30 or RX 6000 series GPU, you're probably considering a GPU upgrade. PC gamers have this unquenchable thirst for new hardware, mostly GPUs, that's renewed each time a new product generation arrives. Granted, your old GPU might look tame in comparison, but if it can still run the latest games at decent framerates, you might want to look at a monitor upgrade instead. A large population of gamers still ignores the importance of a capable display. Here are some signs your monitor has overstayed its welcome, and you should save for a new gaming monitor instead of a GPU.

Apple TV dropped the Plus because everyone was already doing it, according to Cue. We have some new insight into Apple’s muddled rebrand of Apple TV Plus to Apple TV, courtesy of an interview with the company’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue. Speaking on The Town podcast, Cue said that no consultants were involved, and that it was a collective decision to drop the “Plus” from the streaming service because everyone was already calling it Apple TV.The Plus was included in the original name because that’s what Apple uses to distinguish the paid versions of its free services, such as iCloud Plus and News Plus. “We stayed consistent because of it, but we all called it Apple TV, and we said, given where we are today, it’s a great time to do it, so let’s just do it,” said Cue.Cue also brushed off concerns that the rebrand might create confusion between the streaming service, Apple TV hardware, and the Apple TV app. “Our hardware is called Apple TV 4K for your TV. I think that’s fine, and the app is called Apple TV,” Cue said. “It’s been called Apple TV on our third-party products as well, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem at all.”

Google is making videos created with the AI filmmaking tool Flow even more realistic — and harder to identify as AI-generated at first glance. The company announced Wednesday that users can add in and change the shadows and lighting of their AI videos. The expanded editing features in Flow are tied to the Veo 3.1 update, also announced on Wednesday, which Google says does a better job of making a video based on the images submitted as a prompt.  Flow users will also be able to generate videos with audio using several of the tool’s new features. Users can make a video with audio based on three reference images that the company calls “Ingredients to Video.” Another feature, called “Frames to Video,” creates a video that bridges a starting image with an ending image, with accompanying audio. The “Scene Extension” feature lets you take the final second of a clip and add on additional generated video up to a minute in length, also with generated audio. Veo 3.1 costs the same as Veo 3, is available as part of a “paid preview” through Gemini API to developers, and is enabled in the Gemini app.  According to Google, Flow users will soon be able to remove “anything” from a video — the tool will restructure the background and scene to make “it look as though the object was never there.”

When I first started building my smart home, I did what most people do: I bought a bunch of off-the-shelf smart devices, installed their apps, and connected them to my network. Some of them I've had for years, but as time went on, I realized I don't truly "own" these devices. From lights to smart plugs and even voice assistants, I endeavored to replace them with my own alternatives... or at the very least, take back control of them.