How-To Geek

Ubuntu remains the most recognizable name in desktop Linux, yet a distro built on top of it often does a better job for everyday users. Linux Mint takes Ubuntu’s foundation and turns it into something friendlier, which says a lot about where Canonical’s priorities lie.

Earlier this year, I found an old 2-in-1 convertible laptop in my closet that I hadn't touched in a couple of years after I cracked its screen. I'd since replaced it with a business laptop and figured the old machine wasn't good for much until I realized one day that I could just turn it into a headless home server.

If you’ve got a desktop PC with a built-in Wi-Fi solution and you’ve been facing network issues, there’s a good chance the culprit is the Wi-Fi chip on your motherboard, especially if you’re using a budget board. The truth is that many motherboards come with subpar Wi-Fi, often because vendors want to keep prices down. That can result in random disconnects, poor performance when the signal is less than ideal, and driver issues.

AMD has been making CPUs that are popular among desktop gamers for years, with numerous chips earning legendary status for their performance and excellent value.

Wi-Fi 7 is ridiculously fast. So much so that most households have no use for it, not to mention actually having the gear to support it. Just having a router with Wi-Fi 7 doesn't mean that your entire home and your ISP can support those wild speeds.

Once a manufacturer stops supporting a device, you might assume it's headed for the e-waste bin. When online services and updates disappear, many devices become effectively useless. But thanks to enthusiast communities, that isn't always the case; many products become even more useful after official support ends.

Last weekend marked the arrival of one of Netflix's newest movies, Animals, starring Ben Affleck and Kerry Washington. It's a political thriller about a mayoral candidate who fights to save his kidnapped son. With an enticing premise and an A-list cast, I'd expect Animals to become a popular movie with subscribers this week.

I've been a fan of Dygma's keyboards since their very first Raise keyboard. I have used a Dygma Raise or Raise 2 for the better part of five years now, so when the opportunity came about to try out the Sonsei, I jumped at it. This uniquely portable columnar keyboard surprised me in quite a few ways. But, at the end of the day, I really love this little keyboard, even though there's a big learning curve.

Once, it was relatively inexpensive to buy another hard drive and throw it in your server when you ran out of space. These days, "just add another drive" is an expensive proposition.

Waze gets me where I need to go, but that doesn’t always make the drive pleasant. Sometimes, it talks over my Spotify playlist, and other times, its suggested routes make me wonder what it’s thinking. I’ve used the app enough to know its basic features, but I rarely bother exploring beyond the usual directions and traffic alerts.

A polished Linux terminal rarely arrives preconfigured. TheLinux terminal fits most people, but the setups people admire are assembled piece by piece around stuff like Zsh and Oh My Zsh. Here is what those tools are, why they make a strong foundation, and whether the effort pays off.

For most of my life, owning a PC meant having a tower case so big it made more sense to keep it on the floor. But with all the hardware stuffed in that box, it actually needed to be that size.

I'd never imagined that I would be using a task manager from the Linux terminal. Using commands to create to-do lists instead of using a cool-looking GUI with color customization options. That's until I came across Taskwarrior. It's a free, open-source task manager that's also simple to use. But that's the point. It can replace other bloated desktop apps.

Apple wanted its original iMac to look like the future, and even the mouse got the translucent-plastic treatment. The trouble was that the mouse was a circle, and hands aren't particularly circular. What followed was a small but fascinating collection of products designed to make Apple's distinctive little puck more comfortable, more familiar, or entirely unnecessary.

We're in the midst of the fall TV onslaught, when many big shows come firing back with hot new seasons. If you're a planner with severe FOMO like me, a good look ahead at what's coming is just the kind of obsessive thing you need to make sure you don't miss anything.

Ditching Google on an Android phone isn't as hard as you might think — until you need directions. Gmail, Search, and even YouTube all have decent replacements, but Google Maps is harder to part ways with. Not many alternatives offer live traffic, accurate business info, and reliable navigation in one app. Vela Maps is trying to change that.

If you use either Plex or Jellyfin, you'll know that managing your library can take up more time than you originally expected. It's an important part of the process, though. Both apps pull in the standard metadata for your content, but it's mostly factual information and doesn't necessarily reflect how you're going to use your library.

Linux ships with hundreds of small utilities, and most people stick to a handful. Turns out, there are tons of forgotten commands that can be either slightly fun or extremely useful. Three of them, tac, shuf, and timeout, solve common problems in a single line and take seconds to learn. And they might just earn a spot in your repertoire of commands.

While the term "agentic AI" has circulated in tech and business for some time, frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Meta are now reimagining it for the masses. Imagine an AI pet with a cute name and a distinctive personality that can perform tasks on your behalf. That's essentially the idea behind OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse — personal AI agents designed to handle tasks for you.