If you're in the gaming scene right now, you've likely already seen two trends arising after Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Game of the Year at the Game Awards. The first is a whole bunch of memes claiming that Clair Obscur can win awards it's not even eligible to win, and the second is some serious discourse over games using generative AI to create assets.

We love Proxmox VE here at XDA, but that's not the only service the company provides. There's a backup solution for Proxmox, a datacenter management tool, and then there's the one we're talking about now — Proxmox Email Gateway. This is an essential program for the enterprise if you'll be hosting an email server to keep company data in-house.

The Steam Winter Sale is a great time to pick up new games for a great price. Many big game releases that were highly praised are often given a nice discount. But besides games that came out during 2025, the Steam sale also includes many past releases as well. And one of the best games for the PlayStation 5 made its way to Steam, and everyone can finally pick it up for cheaper.

Like most chronically online people, I keep coming across cool projects and products. That's exactly how I came across Skylight Calendar. It's a digital picture frame that doubles up as a family calendar. Sounds pretty nifty. What isn't nifty is the $300 price point of the model with a 15-inch display. But it did seem to solve a problem we faced as a family. Like most families, we've been juggling multiple calendars across phones, tablets, and laptops. Everyone has their own schedule, and then we have shared calendars for shared activities. Having access to a shared dashboard for our calendars would solve a big problem with not just glancing at our events, but also with making time for shared activities, especially if the dashboard was always visible and up to date — like the Skylight calendar. But I wasn't very comfortable paying that much for a closed ecosystem and subscription. Thing is, I already run Home Assistant and have a wall-mounted tablet that serves up Home Assistant. How hard could it be to try to build my own version?

Over the years, I’ve tinkered with all sorts of home lab paraphernalia, including repurposed PCs, efficient mini-PCs, and even enterprise-grade hardware. But despite owning significantly more powerful devices, I keep coming back to my Raspberry Pi collection for low-power projects. As a result, I’ve got a couple of Single-Board Computers that I tend to use for an experiment or two, before setting them aside and forgetting about them for the next couple of weeks while I work with containers and VMs.

We all have dealt with slow, complicated software that promises productivity but delivers frustration. But what if the secret to regaining hours every week wasn’t more features, but fewer? Over the years, I have curated a list of essential, lightweight productivity tools that slip seamlessly into my workflow.

Cookie tins feel like a blessing and a curse. On one hand, when you're in the mood for a cookie, you have to wrestle with the lid for a little while to unleash the goodies within. On the other hand, there's a good reason why people use them to store sewing supplies; they're pretty tough and can last a while.

Ever since its introduction, Docker Desktop has been the de facto standard for container management, but its resource-heavy nature forced many of us to seek alternatives like Portainer. While Portainer is powerful for fleet management, I have finally switched my entire workflow to Podman, and I can confidently say this daemonless, rootless container engine is better than both its predecessor.

I've been on the home server and self-hosted train long enough to know that when you're constantly experimenting with apps and services, you're tempted to opt in for larger, all-encompassing platforms that promise to do everything. NextCloud is a prime example of such an app. I understand that it's got a place and there's a reason why it's such a beloved tool in the self-hosting community, but for me, I've come to realize that more features do not always translate into a better experience. Control, privacy, flexibility are what drew me into self-hosting in the first place, and I've started preferring apps and services that come without the baggage of excess services, databases, background jobs and more things than you need.

If you spend any amount of time in home-lab communities or pursuing forums, you’ll notice a weird propensity to dump on Windows. Real home labs run Linux. Proxmox, TrueNAS, ESXi replacements, Docker everywhere. Windows Server, if it’s mentioned at all, is usually treated as an enterprise relic; bloated, licensed, and fundamentally wrong for “serious” tinkering.

If you have a home server or home lab, you might always be thinking about upgrades to bolster its capabilities. From more storage and a new GPU to ECC RAM and 10Gb Ethernet, there's a lot you can do to upgrade your home server. That said, you might be ignoring a critical upgrade as you chase better specs. A UPS should be the next investment for your home server, providing not only power backup for uninterrupted operations, but also protection from power anomalies. Without a UPS, you're risking annoying interruptions, data loss, and even permanent damage to your hardware.

You've probably heard this a million times, but building a balanced PC isn't the right answer every time. Balancing the core components in every build seems sensible on the surface, but quickly falls apart in the face of real-world considerations. Gaming at 1080p involves wildly different considerations than gaming at 4K. And a PC for video editing needs to prioritize different components than one for 3D rendering. Building an intentionally lopsided PC is the best way to extract the most performance out of your budget. You don't need to build a "balanced" PC; you need to build one optimized for your needs.