XDA

I gave my Steam Deck a proper desktop mode with a dock and a mouse, and it replaced my travel laptop

Abhinav Raj — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:19 GMT

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.

I cancelled Microsoft 365 for my family of five, and the hardest part was the hidden challenge I overlooked

Yash Patel — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 23:00:19 GMT

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.

I gave my retro DOS games the DLSS 5 treatment, and the results were all over the place

Samarveer Singh — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:00:18 GMT

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.

Obsidian's plugin library doubled to over 8,000 this year, and you still only need about four of them

Patrick Hearn — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:30:19 GMT

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.

I put my Zigbee coordinator on a USB extension cable, and half my flaky sensors started working

Jasmine Mannan — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:00:20 GMT

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.

The new GNOME OS Preview is perfect for people who want something more stable than nightly

Simon Batt — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:44:36 GMT

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.

Intel's 12th Gen CPUs have become the Windows 10 of PC hardware, and nobody is in a hurry to leave

Tanveer Singh — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:31:20 GMT

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 put all of Wikipedia on my home server, and it still answers when the internet is down

João Carrasqueira — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:01:20 GMT

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.

I stopped using Bluetooth audio in my car, and my music finally sounds like it should

Chandraveer Mathur — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:31:20 GMT

Personal audio can be a bottomless pit of money and wants, but few people realize cars are the perfect place to settle in for a calm listening session. They're well isolated from ambient noise, speakers are typically set up in a classic surround-sound layout like a home theater, and you can stream anything from your library to the vehicle's infotainment system with conveniences like Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

Just $600 for a 15.3-inch touchscreen laptop with a Ryzen 7 processor and 15-hour battery life

Timi Cantisano — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:18:59 GMT

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 is a powerful laptop that works well for a wide range of tasks. Available at Best Buy with a $400 discount, this model features a 15.3-inch 2K touchscreen, an AMD Ryzen 7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. For $600, that's an absolute steal.