We love the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) here at XDA. If you've never heard of it, it's basically an ESP32 hooked up to a display, and it's, well, cheap and yellow. We've crowned it one of the best additions you can make to a smart home, and we've even made a distributed computer with three of them.

The Raspberry Pi has always been easy to recommend for home automation, but the Raspberry Pi 5 complicates that recommendation in a useful way. If all you need is a box to run Home Assistant, a few Zigbee devices, and some basic automations, it’s more machine than the job really needs. A Raspberry Pi 4 can still handle that workload comfortably, and older models can remain useful for modest setups. The Pi 5 starts to make more sense when the home automation hub becomes part of a wider home lab rather than a single-purpose appliance.

Yusuf Mehdi launching Copilot Plus PCs in 2024. | Image: Getty Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, is leaving the company after 35 years. Mehdi announced his departure in an internal memo on Thursday, noting that he will leave Microsoft next year. He will remain focused on marketing for Windows, Copilot for consumers and the Microsoft 365 consumer business until 2027."As I thought about this decision, one thing was crystal clear: I want to ensure I have the time and space to set the team - and our mission - up for continued success," says Mehdi in his memo. "We are in the middle of an incredibly important moment for Microsoft and for our customers." …Read the full story at The Verge.

48,000 Samsung workers had threatened to strike unless bonus caps were lifted. | Photo: Jung Yeon-je / AFP via Getty Images Details have emerged about a tentative deal struck between Samsung and semiconductor employees who had threatened to strike. The deal reportedly makes some workers eligible for average annual bonuses of $340,000.The proposed 18-day strike had hinged on Samsung's bonus cap for employees in the semiconductor division and followed a substantial rise in the possible bonuses available to employees of SK Hynix, another South Korean chipmaker enjoying a boom thanks to demand for AI components.Under the terms of the new deal, Reuters reports that all ​chip workers will receive 50 percent of their annual salary as a regular bonus in cash. Further …Read the full story at The Verge.

Like most developers, I have spent the last few months hunting for the ultimate VS Code successor. I have jumped between the slick context-awareness of Cursor and the command-line power of Claude Code.

Let's say you spent months picking out parts or researching a pre-built PC. You made sure to get 16GB of fast dual-channel RAM, so your games would run smoothly, and your desktop wouldn't choke under heavy multitasking. But somehow your system feels strangely sluggish. You notice erratic 1% low frame rate, which is stuttering, in CPU-bound games like Cyberpunk or Counter-Strike. Alongside this, opening heavy apps feels slightly delayed. For some reason, despite the fact that you opted for 16GB of RAM, it just feels like your PC is a machine with half of the memory capacity it has.

Microsoft is in a little bit of a pickle. It spent the better part of 2025 getting excited over Copilot and rolling it out to every app it has. Now, in 2026, the company is clearing up the mess it made after people told Microsoft that they'd actually prefer not to have an AI in everything they use.

Microsoft is rolling out Office app updates next week that allow users to disable a floating Copilot button. The button appeared in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in recent weeks, and floats above the bottom right-hand section of spreadsheets or documents. It has angered many Excel users in particular, because it obstructs cells and you can't fully disable it."While we are seeing increased engagement with Copilot in Office apps with this update, we are also hearing the need for more control over how Copilot appears," admits Katie Kivett, partner group product manager at Microsoft. "While one of our goals is to evolve Copilot to be more adapti …Read the full story at The Verge.

I like Claude Code, but I don't like its limitations. You're largely restricted to Anthropic's models like Claude Sonnet and Opus. They're excellent models, but they can get expensive quickly, even for relatively simple tasks. Claude Code is also closed-source. Whether you're an enterprise concerned about data governance or an individual who prefers transparent tools, that can be a drawback.

AMD officially confirmed on Thursday last week that FSR 4.1 will be coming to RDNA 3 GPUs in July 2026, with RDNA 2 hardware following in early 2027. It's a game-changing feature expansion by itself, but it becomes considerably more significant than the announcement lets on.

If you’ve set your mind on putting together a NAS for your home lab, there are a bunch of factors you’ll want to consider. On the hardware front, the drive bays and Ethernet provisions are the most obvious factors you’ll want to keep an eye out for, with the RAM capacity being just as important for ZFS-powered pools. But the operating system you choose for your NAS matters at least as much as its specs, if not more.

Wayland has been the center of a few big Linux stories this year. We've seen some distros adopt it, we've seen some drop X11 in favor of it, and we've seen people creating alternatives to X11 to stave off Wayland. But nobody asks, "What about adding Wayland to Minecraft?" mainly because, why would they? Minecraft is a game, not an operating system.