If you're new to Linux, or you've happily existed in Mint's easygoing ecosystem for years, you might want to hear what its downsides are. That comfortable feeling may cost you dearly.

Most Linux distros you'll find are basically a pile of separate programs—a panel, a compositor, a window manager, and so on—all exchanging information and coordinating their behavior to create a cohesive experience.

Whether you're just trying to kill some time or you have some chores to get done, there is nothing worse than sitting around in silence. To me, having a little background noise can ease the pain of any mundane task. I particularly like to put something on that I can half pay attention to, which usually means opting for something light and easy.

If you're new to Linux and switching from Windows to Linux, there are some mistakes you want to avoid. Avoiding common beginner mistakes in Linux will put you ahead of the other Linux newbies.

When I hear HBO Max, I think of critical acclaim. The streamer lived up to its reputation, as HBO Max dominated the Emmy nominations. For the 2026 Emmy Awards, HBO Max led the field with 122 total nominations. That's a testament to the streamer's commitment to making prestige dramas and comedies.

VLC will always have a place on any Windows, macOS, or Linux PC I own. It's been the Swiss Army knife of media players for decades at this point, and you'd be forgiven if you simply stopped looking once you found the one media player to rule them all.

A colleague recently went to see The Prodigy live, and it made me nostalgic about my old PlayStation. Wipeout 2097 was one of the first games I owned for the console, and the song Firestarter still makes me think of the futuristic racing game. I really want to play it again, but instead of setting up RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi, I used an old phone.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city is not in decline but is in danger — finding that 10 companies, nine of them in tech, pay three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers, and that the tax structure uniquely penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers.

The report says Seattle should be most concerned about AI but most active in cleantech, the one industry the city can actually shape, since it owns the electric utility and controls permitting, building codes and land use.

Meanwhile, the Seattle Times and Newsday sue Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing them of copying hundreds of thousands of articles to train their AI models, putting Microsoft’s hometown paper against a company that helps fund some of its journalism.

And Apple’s first foldable arrives as the iPhone Duo, reviving the name of the dual-screen phone Microsoft gave up on in 2023, with Surface fans arguing Apple took more than the name.

Which leads us to a new GeekWire Trivia Challenge about the Microsoft products that Apple later turned into categories. Stick around to the final segment to see if you can figure it out.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.

Netflix is still the undisputed king of the streamers, having been doing it since 2007 and making its own shows since 2012. That means that while it has accumulated a vast number of hits, award winners, and record-breakers, it's also had its fair share of originals that once broke new ground and ruled the conversations, but have long since slipped into obscurity.

Completed another Hack The Box machine, Silentium.

Initial access was achieved by exploiting a password-reset vulnerability in the staging Flowise application, followed by abusing a custom MCP endpoint to obtain a root shell inside the Flowise container. Credentials exposed through the container environment were then used to SSH into the underlying host as ben and retrieve the flag.

For privilege escalation, an internal Gogs instance was discovered through local port forwarding. A malicious symlink was pushed and manipulated through the Gogs API to target /etc/sudoers.d/ben, allowing a passwordless sudo rule to be written and ultimately providing full root access.

#HackTheBox #HTB #CyberSecurity #PenetrationTesting #OffensiveSecurity #Linux #PrivilegeEscalation #WebSecurity #CTF …

Learn MoreHack The Box: Silentium Machine Walkthrough – Easy Difficulity

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Like a lot of Windows users, I resisted Linux for years for two main reasons. I expected a steep learning curve, and I assumed I'd have to give up some of the Windows apps I rely on every day. Either one is enough to make switching feel like more trouble than it's worth.

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are the latest premium smartphones on the block, but you're going to need a screen protector to keep them looking in tip-top condition for longer.

The post Best Screen Protectors For iPhone 18 Pro And 18 Pro Max You Can Buy first appeared on Redmond Pie.

I’ve been using Linux for many, many years now, but I still keep learning new things all the time. It seems like, no matter what task you’re running, there’s a faster way to do it. So I decided to start focusing on these speed gains to see just how fast my terminal life can be.

As we wait patiently for more of Netflix's September crop of TV series to make their way to your algorithm, here's this weekend's lineup of bingable shows to settle in with—my top pick is still hoping for Emmy gold on Monday, and two are great shows, regardless of their age.

Buying used enterprise storage is one of those things that makes perfect sense when you look at the price and becomes more complicated once you actually put the hardware into a machine. Enterprise HDDs that originally cost a small fortune can appear on the used market for surprisingly little money. For a homelab, where storage capacity is always useful and budgets are rarely unlimited, it is difficult to ignore those prices.

I've been an Arch user for five years, and it's been a love-hate relationship. I love having access to the AUR (Arch User Repository) and the hundreds of thousands of packages it brings with it, along with access to bleeding-edge updates as soon as they drop. But at the same time, I hate it when a buggy update just wrecks my system, not to mention the current malware mess with the AUR and all the headaches that come with it.

Some weeks, the easiest way to find something good on Netflix is to skip over the newest releases and instead look into its library. The platform's diverse catalog has a lot to offer, especially when it comes to movies that have swept award shows during their respective runs.