Almost every Linux user will tell you that bloat is bad — you should go with something minimal so you can customize it to your liking. There’s also a popular belief that Linux beginners should stay clear of Arch and tiling window managers, which are reserved for more “advanced” users. Well, Omarchy is based on Arch, uses the Hyprland tiling window manager, and is one of the most bloated and opinionated distros out there. And here’s my argument for why, despite conventional wisdom, I think it’s perfect for Linux beginners.
Are you tired of paying for tons of cloud subscriptions? What if I told you a sub-$100 homelab could pay for itself? Here’s what you need to get started with homelabbing and how canceling just three subscriptions can pay off your investment in around two months.
Welcome to Edition 9.17 of the Rocket Report! It's been a while since an American company announced plans for a medium-lift new launch vehicle, but that's what happened this week when a startup named Cowboy Space revealed specs for its Big Iron rocket, named for the classic country-western song by Marty Robbins. I'm a huge fan of the name. Maybe Cowboy Space is striking while the iron is hot as the space industry frets over demand for launch outpacing supply. However, Cowboy Space lags far behind so many other launch providers nearing the launch pad with their medium-class rockets, and the company didn't have much hardware to show at this week's big reveal. In other words, don't mistake style for substance. But we're rocket fans at Ars, and we wish them luck.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Virgin's new rocket plane reaches home port. The first of Virgin Galactic's new Delta-class rocket planes left its Arizona factory Wednesday for a trip to Spaceport America in neighboring New Mexico, where it will undergo preparations for a test campaign culminating in suborbital flights to the edge of space, Ars reports. Virgin Galactic expects the craft's first commercial spaceflight to take place "early" in the second quarter of 2027, but like every other projected date in aerospace, this should be taken with a grain of salt. Virgin Galactic halted commercial flights of its previous vehicle, VSS Unity, in 2024.
Donald Glover will star in Netflix's live-action PUBG series and help write and direct it. Stephen Glover joins him behind the camera, but the adaptation doesn't have a release date or revealed storyline yet.
Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro arrives Nov. 6. Explore pricing, M5 Pro and M5 Max specs, OLED features, battery life, and whether it's worth upgrading.
Unsurprisingly, audiences are loving Nobody Wants This season 3, one of Netflix's new releases in October. The rom-com starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody has been a hit across three seasons, and I expect the show to return for a fourth season. If you haven't watched Nobody Wants This, then consider throwing it into your rotation.
You might often hear Plex and Kodi being mentioned in the same breath, which makes it sound like the two media applications are ones that force you to choose a side.
AI models need huge amounts of data to train on, and researchers are warning that AI companies could run out of high-quality public data to use. Your own data isn't safe; even if you're unaware of it, AI companies may be training their models on your social media posts and more.
Linux has a reputation for being difficult or tedious to work with because it involves using a command-line interface all the time. Today, that reputation doesn't hold up. While some modern Linux distros are still very terminal heavy, many are every bit as approachable as Windows or macOS—you only really use the terminal when you want to use it.
The Holiday season is upon us, and Amazon is making its AI shopping assistant a lot more useful ahead of major shopping events like Black Friday. The company has announced over 100 new Alexa for Shopping capabilities, letting customers manage subscriptions, create gift lists, change delivery instructions, and ask billing questions simply by asking. The […]
I love a good thriller, but finding one I haven’t already watched (or had the ending spoiled for me) is another matter. Netflix has plenty of thrillers to choose from, although it’s easy to keep coming across the same familiar titles when you’re deciding what to watch.
For nearly a quarter of a century, Elon Musk and his essential partner at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, viewed the United States government as El Dorado, the mythical city of gold.
Like machete-wielding treasure hunters, Musk and Shotwell hacked through a tangled jungle filled with lurking carnivores such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as bean counters and regulators. Over time, against long odds, the pair cleared a path for SpaceX to contracts at NASA and the US military. They sued when things did not go their way. They hollered about unfair playing fields. Most importantly, they delivered quality space products to the US government for less.
And so, after a while, SpaceX found El Dorado and a city of contracts.
The usual narrative is that a Windows user switches to Linux and then complains about the app gap. That said, I’ve been using Linux for over 10 years, and when I switch back to Windows, I notice an app gap, too — in both functionality and quality.
Halloween is the perfect excuse to revisit some horror favorites, and Netflix has a few additions that fit the season. From supernatural scares and gory survival thrillers to creature features and classic slashers, the platform hosts a variety of titles you can pick from.
Apple’s touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro starts at $2,899. Explore display specs, app compatibility, release dates, and what IT buyers should test before upgrading.
The private space tourism era looked so very promising five years ago. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had begun flying customers—real people with zero space experience—on suborbital missions. And at about the same time, private citizens were going to orbit for days at a time aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon.
But that was then. Consider the state of play today:
It has been 10 months since Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft flew its last mission in January. The program was subsequently "paused," but let's be real. Blue Origin has moved on. New Shepard's engineering teams are now supporting the New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander programs.
SpaceX flew its final free-flyer mission on Dragon, Fram2, in April 2025. A handful of non-NASA missions bound for space stations remain on the spacecraft's manifest, but all are likely to carry at least one government astronaut. Then Dragon will be retired. There is no credible timeline for SpaceX's Starship to fly humans into space from Earth.
As for Virgin Galactic, the company flew its final suborbital mission on the VSS Unity spacecraft more than two years ago, in June 2024.
So we are now 10 months, and counting, without a space tourism mission in the United States.
LOS ANGELES—For about five minutes on an extremely crowded showroom floor, I got to take pictures of the new MacBook Pro and test out some of its new features. First impressions: It's not as much of a departure from the previous design as I expected, but the outstanding OLED display steals the show regardless.
The first thing I noticed was that it's lighter. My daily driver is a 14-inch MacBook Pro (M1 Max), and it's a bit weighty for a 14-incher. Picking up the new model, I could immediately tell it was lighter. It's not like it's in a different general weight class, but it's a noticeable difference.
Googlebook's clumsy launch made me wish that I wasn't a product reviewer. I had to spend two weeks using a laptop with what felt like an unfinished operating system (cue the world's smallest violin), and throughout the entire process, I just kept thinking how nice it would be if Google had taken all of its biggest Googlebook features and slapped them on a mainline Linux distro instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Terminal-based apps are awesome, but if you’ve ever tried to use them, you’re probably already aware of their biggest annoyance: you have to open a terminal and type a command every time. They don’t show up in your dock or app launcher the way regular desktop apps do. Thankfully, there’s a quick and easy fix for that. It’ll hardly take a few minutes, and you’ll be able to give your terminal apps their own icons and entries in your application launcher.
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