How-To Geek

Linux newcomers in 2026 have a much easier time than people did 10 or 15 years ago. You no longer need to install Linux with one hand on a wiki page and the other hand praying to the bootloader gods. Most major distros now install cleanly, detect hardware well, and give you a working desktop in under half an hour.

When the first Echo Show smart displays were released, I thought they would be perfect for my smart home. Fast-forward several years, and I almost never use them for monitoring my smart home or controlling smart devices. In fact, I get more use out of an old Kindle.

I have a lot of storage for my Plex server—over 60TB, actually. However, even I sometimes run into space issues and have to find ways to free up hard drive storage without deleting things. That’s where Tdarr comes in, and here’s how I used it to free up over 7TB of space on my server.

I'm a musician with a small recording studio and a lot of complicated gear. Between keyboards, pedals, audio interfaces, amps, and recording software, there's usually more than one way to accomplish the same thing. Every time I add a new device, it takes time and patience to learn what it can do, how it fits into the rest of my setup, and which settings make the most sense for the way I work.

If you have a Raspberry Pi and E-Ink display sitting unused, it's time to pull them out of the drawer. There is so much you can do with just those two pieces of tech, but I boiled it down to four projects that you can build this weekend for fun.

You don't need to spend hours in a spreadsheet to level up your Excel skills. If you have 15 minutes to spare this weekend, try building one of these clever, professional-looking projects. They're quick to finish, satisfying to make, and genuinely useful once you're done.

July's television slate is off to a hot start. Silo returned to Apple TV for its third season, while the Legally Blonde prequel series Elle debuted as Prime Video's No. 1 original series last week. As for what's on tap this weekend, Netflix will release the first season of an adaptation of a beloved novel series. That show is our top selection, and you can finish it this weekend because it's only eight episodes.

The Kia Forte quietly disappeared after the 2024 model year, replaced by the new K4 as Kia continued reshaping its sedan lineup. Unlike many discontinued cars, the Forte wasn’t pushed aside because it was outdated—it simply became another compact sedan overlooked as buyers moved toward SUVs.

Homelabs don't always have to be massive. Sometimes, just a Raspberry Pi, a laptop, and an old phone or two can be an ideal lab setup. I'm in the latter camp, preferring old phones to tinker around with in my free time. My latest experiment is repurposing an old Motorola phone in my homelab.

Saving money at the pump usually means making compromises, whether it's paying more upfront for a hybrid or settling for a less desirable car. But one affordable sedan quietly breaks that rule, delivering exceptional fuel economy without demanding a premium price or sacrificing everyday usability.

Are you currently learning Bash? Have you seen things like $0 and $EUID and wondered what they mean? Or what the difference is between $UID and $EUID? I'll cover these and more: what they do and why they're important.

Valve's second-generation Steam Controller released in May 2026 and sold out almost immediately. When you're looking at it, it is immediately obvious that it is a continuation of the original Steam Controller, but there are some important differences.

Paying monthly for Claude made sense until I actually looked at what I was getting versus what I was giving up. The cost adds up, and I'm sure that more people are starting to see this too. If you've had that same realization, the tools below are worth knowing about. They cover the main features that Claude has without the major downsides and takedowns.

For years, buying an affordable electric SUV meant accepting one major compromise: limited driving range. That's no longer the case. Advances in battery technology and growing competition have made it possible to get well over 300 miles on a charge without spending luxury-car money.

A direct Ethernet line should be faster than a Wi-Fi connection. That's what I thought at least. Downloads were taking forever. Web pages were slow to load. Sometimes, the reason can be a handful of network adapter settings that affect how your PC handles its wired connection.

Android has come to dominate the global smartphone marketplace, and a large part of why this has happened is thanks to its open-source nature. Any phone maker can put Android on its phones with no licensing fees, and its adoption has also spawned a massive app ecosystem, so unless you're a trillion-dollar company like Apple, going a different way isn't sensible.

Why carry both a phone and a laptop if one device could do both? A Redditor has built a DIY "laptop" shell that is fully 3D printed, complete with a folding keyboard, a hideaway mouse, a massive battery, and a shoulder strap. It doesn’t have a processor of its own—instead, it uses a Pixel 9 running on GrapheneOS as the engine.

Are you just using your home server as if it was a spare desktop? If so, you're using it wrong. Your home server is capable of so much more, so here are three things to help you change how you think about your home server.

As numerous miniseries have shown us, not all powerful crime stories require multiple seasons. The most impactful ones are presented as sharp and focused, with their destination apparent from the get-go. This is where crime miniseries really stand out. They dive directly into the heart of the story, the drama, and the repercussions that follow, and we can't look away.

One thing Linux fans have always loved to tout over Windows was its security. While Windows has had lots of high-profile security breaches, Linux has also had its share of malware attacks, putting the belief that it's more secure than Windows in question.