Microsoft 365 had become a familiar part of our family's digital life, but I started wondering whether we really needed the entire package. With five people using different apps for different tasks, I wanted a setup that made more sense for how we actually worked. So I decided to explore alternatives instead of automatically renewing the subscription. I didn't expect every replacement to be perfect, but I wanted to see how far I could go without Microsoft's ecosystem. What surprised me most wasn't finding alternatives to its popular apps. It was discovering which part of the switch demanded the most effort.

Obsidian has grown in popularity, and the plugin library has absolutely exploded. It's grown by more than 3,000 plugins in the last few months alone, with options for nearly every niche or application you can think of. It's impressive, and it's always fun to browse the library to see what's new. But here's the thing: despite the plugin library's exponential growth, you really only need a few. By all means, install as many as you want — but if you're minimizing your vault, these are the four I'd keep.

After this horrific crash involving a Tesla driver who said he was asleep and using the driver assist mode, the California Highway Patrol warns that "Despite its name, full self-driving is not fully autonomous. Technology does not relieve drivers of their responsibility to safely operate their vehicles."Video released by CHP shows the Tesla speeding past flares, cones, and emergency lights where officers were on the scene of an earlier accident, before ramming into the back of a parked patrol vehicle. CHP says two officers were seriously injured in the accident and taken to a hospital.Two Solano CHP officers were seriously injured when …Read the full story at The Verge.

Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man, who got to hear the album for the first time thanks to Pablo Torre Finds Out. | Getty Images Wu-Tang's Once Upon A Time in Shaolin album has, for the most part, been extremely difficult to listen to, but you can now hear two snippets of the album thanks to the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, which just published an episode all about the exclusive record.Once Upon A Time in Shaolin has a long history, which Pablo Torre Finds Out goes into in detail. Disgraced pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli bought the only copy of the album, which cannot be commercially released until 2103, in 2015 at auction. Shkreli had to forfeit the album to the US government, and the government sold it in 2021 to the crypto art collective PleasrDAO, whi …Read the full story at The Verge.

Are you still using Windows 10? There's a 27% chance that you are, which is surprising, considering Windows 11 has been out for over five years. In fact, it's been over a year since Microsoft ended support for Windows 10. Despite that, people refuse to abandon the beloved OS in favor of Windows 11 for a variety of reasons. Similarly, Intel's 12th Gen (Alder Lake) owners aren't motivated to upgrade to something else.

I really love bleeding-edge Linux distros. Sure, they may not be the most stable distros of the bunch, but I love getting the newest features first. Regardless, I totally understand why people would shy away from something like GNOME OS, which, until now, only had a nightly build. Now, the GNOME Foundation has announced GNOME OS Preview, which takes a comfy middle ground between receiving the newest features and having a stable system.

Apple has finally announced its long-rumored foldable: the iPhone Duo.The new phone has a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner display, a “nano‑texture” finish on the inner screen, and barely any visible crease. Instead of Face ID, it uses Touch ID on the power button. It has two cameras, a main lens and a wide-angle lens. Apple completely revamped iOS 27’s controls and apps for the foldable, including putting the dock on the side of the phone. And it has a flashy opening animation when you unfold the phone.The iPhone Duo a big new bet from Apple, though one that’s a little late to the game compared to competitors like Samsung and Google. The phone isn’t cheap: it starts at $1,999 for the base 256GB model, and the prices only go up from there. Still, Apple said that preorder demand was “extraordinary,” so it could have a hit on its hands.Here’s everything unfolding about the iPhone Duo. Apple says iPhone Duo preorder demand has been “extraordinary.” iPhone Duo orders are already delayed into 2027 The iPhone Duo is now available to preorder at $1,999 Prep your cart before iPhone Duo preorders open tomorrow Repairing the iPhone Duo’s folding screen costs as much as a new iPhone TCL’s paperlike OLED phone made me more excited for the iPhone Duo We unfolded the iPhone Duo Apple addresses iPhone Duo copycats The iPhone Duo’s hardware doesn’t look special, but its software might be How the iPhone Duo compares to other folding phones Verge staffers react to the iPhone Duo: What we love and don’t love Apple iPhone Duo launch event: The 5 biggest announcements Apple completely revamped iOS 27’s controls and apps for the iPhone Duo The iPhone Duo is Apple’s first foldable

Apple's App Store rules now more explicitly ban so-called "nudify" apps that generate intimate images of people without their consent using AI tools.The rule changes follow significant criticism toward Apple after X users used Grok earlier this year to make nonconsensual, sexualized deepfakes, including minors. Apple didn't pull X or Grok from the App Store, though it told senators that it threatened to yank Grok. At Apple's WWDC event in June, protestors also called on Apple to "remove Grok, X, and all nudify technology from the App Store," and in July, a San Francisco city attorney ordered Apple to remove 13 "nudify" apps, which it said …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ever since DLSS 5 dropped, I've been throwing it at any game that catches my fancy. I've "remastered" classic PS2 and PS3 games with DLSS 5, and AAA titles run pretty well with neural rendering despite my aging RTX 4070 Ti. In winding the clock back and remastering old games, I wondered what would happen if I threw DLSS 5's neural rendering layers on the pixelated worlds of some of the oldest games I'd ever played — my classic DOS collection.

The Steam Deck is a powerful device, and I'm not talking about the frames it can push in AAA gaming at all, at least not here. I've previously argued that the Deck beats a budget gaming laptop on long-haul trips, and most of what I argued came down to the form factor, since the handheld was the clear winner in situations where I couldn't find a desk to house the laptop.

We live in an age where getting any kind of information can be done in a few minutes with a simple internet search. But that's just the thing — all that information lives on the internet, so you're always dependent on a connection to get the answers you need, even if you have a locally hosted LLM to ask questions.

The universal frustration of smart home deployment is when things stop working. Some of your buttons stop responding, door sensors report unavailable, and motion triggers take 10 seconds to fire even though your mesh looks fine on paper. It's easy to blame bad routing, cheap sensors, or weak batteries, and you'll end up ripping your hair out trying to repair devices or shuffle routers around the house.