The Steam Deck is one of the most popular devices in the world of PC gaming right now, and ever since its launch back in 2022. The idea that you can have a handheld device that can play most modern PC games with good enough performance seems like it wouldn't have been feasible just a few short years ago, so it really feels like a revolution.

Gaming on any of the three main home console platforms these days has become a lot more complicated. Each of the three console platform makers, which include Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox, has their own subscription services to go with their platform to play online with. But alongside that, each one also has its own mobile app that can be tied to an account for the platform you play games on. If you have an Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation Plus account, you can access the Xbox and PlayStation apps to engage with different parts of the services. The same goes for Nintendo, which can be connected to a Nintendo account that you access through your Nintendo Switch 2 and the Nintendo eShop. All three of them have various things that get players to continuously interact with their platform in different ways.

It’s small, it’s relatively quiet, it has a handy sleep mode with remote wake-up, and the front tiles are even rotatable. The Framework Desktop is a great fit for a living room. I've long dreamed of doing all my gaming on PC - a single platform that's easily upgradeable and lets me play my overstuffed Steam library wherever and however I like. The Steam Deck is a fantastic handheld, but for my living room, I want something more powerful that works as well on my TV as it does at a desk. Believe me, I've tried. Gaming laptops are noisy and awkward, desktops are too chunky, and Windows is annoying to navigate without a keyboard and mouse. I had hoped that Valve's Steam Machine experiment was my ticket, but it crashed and burned long ago. Nothing's ever been as easy as a PlayStation 5.But I'm newly optimistic. I've sp …Read the full story at The Verge.

From the time I stopped paying for cloud storage and migrated from OneDrive to Nextcloud, I've constantly been in search of alternatives to platforms like Google Drive, iCloud, etc. Apart from the cost, a big factor that pushed me to move all my data from cloud servers is privacy. Uploading files to cloud storage means that my data is stored on third-party servers, which always poses a risk — especially when uploading sensitive documents and files. With a self-hosted solution like Nextcloud or Seafile, both of these issues are automatically eliminated. That said, even Nextcloud can get rather clunky for some users, especially since it offers a bucket load of features apart from just file sharing.

Whether you're running a Wi-Fi 6 router at home or jumped straight to Wi-Fi 7, you're no doubt wondering which settings are best to use. The answer might surprise you somewhat, as your home will likely be classed as a low-density environment, which means a slightly simpler set of settings than if you had to optimize for an office building.

Growing up and watching the portrayal of hackers and sysadmins in popular media, I thought everything was done in a Terminal window, and I wanted that when I got my own computers. Using Termix for remote access got me most of the way, but I got to thinking about other things that could be done in the Terminal. One thing led to another, and I found YouTube TUI, which looked perfect for my needs.

Most people use Google’s AI-powered research assistant, NotebookLM, to research faster and get a better grasp of a topic. And that makes sense, since that’s exactly what it’s designed for.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 95, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, new gadget season is starting, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I am listening to independent radio (shoutout to Seattle's KEXP), reading about the life of children's author Richard Scarry, learning about the long development of Hollow Knight: Silksong and "silkposting," watching the trailer for the next season of The Great British Baking Show, perusing the Kottke.org Rolodex, learning about summer sunset times, and enjoying seeing Masahiro Sakurai again.I also …Read the full story at The Verge.

A protest in Netherlands. This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on deep-sea mining and critical minerals, follow Justine Calma. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedThis is not how I thought things would go down when I started covering deep-sea mining. I knew that impatience and greed could have unforeseen consequences for life that depends on healthy oceans, including humans. I just didn't foresee Donald Trump coming back to blow up international negotiations meant to make sure no single government screws up a resource so vital to …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's been over a year now since I first tried using Windows without the Start menu by trying out Flow Launcher, and that little experience quickly converted me into a fan of the app. Later, I found out that Microsoft has been building a similar feature into PowerToys with PowerToys Run, and even more recently, the company decided to replace that tool with Command Palette, an evolved version of it with even more promised capabilities.

Home Assistant is an incredibly powerful piece of software, and it can do a lot more than just link up your hardware from various vendors into one dashboard. You can link practically anything you can think of, from the software running on your PC to games like Counter-Strike. One powerful integration is the IMAP integration, which allows you to link your Home Assistant instance to your email address, with the ability to process every incoming email as you see fit. I took this functionality and turned it into a personal email triage system, all using Home Assistant and a local LLM.

While some may argue that nobody can beat Steam, there's definitely interest in alternatives to the platform. I personally love Steam for its social features and free cloud-saving, but I'm also frustrated by the era of DRM games and the need to first log in to be able to play games that are already installed on my device.