This time I’m really going to do it. I am going to put Linux on my gaming PC. Calling it now. 2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop. Or at least on mine. 

Linux has been a perfectly viable desktop OS for ages. But gaming on Linux is now viable, too. Valve’s hard work getting Windows games to run well on the Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats. Gaming handhelds that ship with Windows run better and have higher frame rates on Bazzite, a Fedora-based distro, than they do with Windows. And after reading about the upcoming Steam Machine and Antonio’s experience running Bazzite on the Framework Desktop, I want to try it.

To be clear, my desktop works fine on Windows 11. But the general ratio of cool new features to egregious bullshit is low. I do not want to talk to my computer. I do not want to use OneDrive. I’m sure as hell not going to use Recall. I am tired of Windows trying to get me to use Edge, Edge trying to get me to use Bing, and everything trying to get me to use Copilot. I paid for an Office 365 subscription so I could edit Excel files. Then Office 365 turned into Microsoft 365 Copilot, and I tried to use it to open a Word document and it didn’t know how. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10, including security updates, forcing people to buy new hardware or live with the risks. It’s disabling workarounds that let you set up Windows 11 with a local account or with older hardware. It’s turning Xboxes into PCs and PCs into upsells for its other businesses. Just this week,  the company announced that it’s putting AI agents in the taskbar to turn Windows into a “canvas for AI.” I do not think Windows is going to be a better operating system in a year, so it feels like a good time to try Linux again. 

I’m not normally one to change frogs midstream, but the water sure is getting hot.

That’s not to say I know what I’m doing. I’ve used Macs for a decade for work, and I dabbled in Ubuntu 20-something years ago, but otherwise I’ve been a Windows guy since 3.1. At first, that’s because it’s what we had at home, later because that’s where the games were, and finally out of force of habit (and because that’s where the games were). I brought a desktop to college instead of a laptop (so I could play games), and I’ve been building my own PCs for 18 years. I started my journalism career at Maximum PC magazine, testing gaming PC components. 

I try to stay familiar with all the major operating systems because of my job, so in addition to my work MacBook I also have a Chromebook, a ThinkPad, and a collection of older hardware I refuse to get rid of. I can work pretty well in Windows, in macOS, or in ChromeOS. 

My experiences with Linux over the past decade, on the other hand, have largely been as a series of extremely optional Tasks: 

• Trying to set up Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi. It sort of worked but was stymied by my home network setup, and I eventually replaced it with Home Assistant.
• Setting up a Beepy, a kind of a bootleg Linux handheld with a tiny monochrome screen and a BlackBerry keyboard. This took longer than I wanted, but it worked in the end, and I learned that using a command-line interface with a BlackBerry keyboard on a tiny monochrome screen is my version of hell. 
• Running a Linux VM on my Chromebook so I could use Obsidian, my preferred note-taking app, which doesn’t have a web interface. This was a pleasant experience and I have no complaints. 
• [deep breath] Setting up three different virtual machines using the Windows Subsystem for Linux so I could build keyboard firmware: one for QMK, one for ZMK, and I think the third was because the first QMK one stopped working. All of these were on my old desktop, on which the entire Linux subsystem somehow broke beyond repair. 

All of those projects, except the Chromebook one, took longer than expected, and cut into my vanishingly rare discretionary time. That’s also the time I use for gaming, reading, staring into the void, and half-starting organizational projects, so you can see how precious it is to me. 

The prospect of instead using that time trying to get my computer back to a baseline level of functionality — that is, as useful as it was before I tried installing Linux — is tempting, but it’s also why I haven’t done it yet. 

It’s a good time to try gaming on Linux. Antonio and Sean have been having fun with Bazzite, a Linux distro that mimics SteamOS; my friend and former colleague Will Smith is cohosting a PCWorld podcast called Dual Boot Diaries with this exact premise. 

And what better device to try it on than my personal desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super graphics card? I just rebuilt this thing. The Windows install is only like six months old. It’s working about as well as Windows does. 

So really, why wouldn’t I blow that up and start over?

Based on listening to two and a half episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and a brief text conversation with Will, I’m going to install CachyOS, an Arch-based distro optimized for gaming on modern hardware, with support for cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs and an allegedly easy setup.

I don’t expect things to go smoothly. I don’t really know what I’m doing, and Linux is still a very small percentage of the PC gaming world. As of the most recent Steam Hardware & Software Survey — the best proxy we have for PC gaming hardware info as a whole — just over 3 percent of Steam users are running Linux. Of those, 27 percent are using SteamOS (and therefore a Steam Deck), 10 percent are using Arch, 6 percent are using CachyOS, 4 percent are using Bazzite, and the rest are split over a bunch of distros. 

So if anything goes wrong in my install, it’ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out. But I’ve cleverly arranged it so the stakes are only medium: I have other machines to work on while my desktop is inevitably borked (and to run programs like Adobe Creative Suite), and if I end up spending hours of my discretionary time learning Linux instead of gaming, well, that’s not the worst outcome. 

Maybe it’ll all go smoothly and I’ll report back in a few weeks, another prophet of the revolution. Maybe it’ll go terribly and I’ll come crawling back. Only one way to find out. 

Qi2 is good because magnets are good.

If you’re gonna preserve food in metal cans, you should probably have a way to open them up again. And if you’re going to rely on induction coils to transfer electricity, you gotta make sure they line up right. It took almost half a century after the invention of canning for someone to invent the can opener, so I guess it’s not too bad it only took eight years for Apple to slap a ring of magnets around a Qi charging coil. And it only took five years after that for Google to put that ring of magnets on a Pixel phone. 

Every phone in the Pixel 10 lineup. announced today, has Qi2 magnetic wireless charging at up to 15W. The Pro XL has Qi2.2 and can charge at up to 25W, which is great and all, but wireless charging isn’t the cool part. The magnets are the cool part. 

Google phones have had regular wireless charging, most of them, since the Nexus 4 back in 2012. Regular Qi charging — wireless charging without magnets, wireless charging for suckers — is sometimes useful. It means you don’t have to fumble around for a cable. Before iPhones moved to USB-C, it meant you could charge Androids and iPhones in the same place with the same device. But get the alignment wrong by even a couple of millimeters and the efficiency tanks; get it wrong by a few more and your phone doesn’t charge at all. The best thing I can say about regular wireless charging is that it gives you another option if your charging port gets damaged or gets water in it. I’ve kept a phone with a busted USB-C port limping along for months with wireless charging. 

The most obvious advantage of Qi2 is that the magnets ensure perfect alignment between the phone’s induction coils and the ones in the charger. The most efficient way to charge a phone will always be with a wired connection, but the least inefficient way to charge wirelessly is with Qi2.

It’s also the most fun way to charge your phone. Just plop it onto the charger — landscape, portrait, doesn’t matter — and go. Your phone will charge at a decent rate, and it leaves the port free for something else, like USB-C headphones or an external monitor or whatever. 

Magnetic charging is super useful, and I’ll come back to it. But it’s the magnets, not the charging, that are the killer feature. Google sells a pop-socket-like thing for the new Pixels (pictured above). But you can use any of the vast array of Qi2-certified accessories with the new Pixel 10s, not to mention the five-plus years’ worth of wallets, camera grips, stands, tripods, and other non-charging accessories designed around the iPhone’s magnetic rings. 

Attach a MicroSD card reader or an SSD (with a screen!). Put a bigger flashlight on your phone. How about a notepad? Stick your phone to a Steam Deck. Stick it to another phone. 

Yes, it’s been possible to use any of these with a Pixel (or pretty much any other phone) with a third-party case or sticky magnet ring. But it’s a lot easier when the magnets are part of the phone.

Because Qi2 is an open standard, there’s a huge array of Qi2 pucks, stands, car mounts, batteries, and other charging accessories already out there. Qi2-certified chargers will work with the new Pixels, the last five years’ worth of iPhones, and Samsung S25 phones (with a Qi2 Ready case). This is exciting news not just for mixed iPhone/Android households, but Galaxy/Pixel ones, too. 

I was a Nexus / Pixel user for a long time. I switched to iPhone in 2019, and I’ve been living the magnet life since I got my current phone, an iPhone 14 Pro. I still love Pixels, but MagSafe/Qi2 is so useful that it’s a major reason I haven’t switched back. There’s no way I’d trade my Qi2 car mount for the clamp-style one I had before. I’m not a barbarian. But now that Pixels have Qi2, I wouldn’t have to.

Some people can tell great wine from okay wine. They go on wine tastings, take wine tours. They tend to spend more money on wine than most. 

I am not one of those people. I can tell wine from vinegar if you show me the bottle. I am just a little bit obsessed with keyboards, though.

I have spent the past couple of months typing on the Seneca, a fully custom capacitive keyboard that starts at $3,600 and might be the best computer keyboard ever built. I’ve also made a bunch of other people type on it — folks whose attitude toward keyboards is a little more utilitarian. My wife uses a mechanical keyboard because I put it on her desk; if I took it away, she would go back to her $30 Logitech membrane keyboard with no complaints. I put the Seneca on her desk. She said it was fine. I took it away. She went back to her other keyboard.

The more normal you are about keyboards, the less impressive the Seneca is. I am not normal about keyboards, and the Seneca is goddamn incredible.

Norbauer & Co Seneca

Pros	Cons
Beautiful Incredible typing feel & sound Classic layout Just look at it	No firmware remappability yet Proprietary cable Preposterously expensive

Where to Buy:

• $3600 at Norbauer & Co

The Seneca is the first luxury keyboard from Norbauer & Co, a company that would like to be for keyboards what Leica is to cameras, Porsche is to cars, or Hermès is to handbags and scarves. 

The thing that’s interesting about the Seneca is not that it’s expensive. It’s easy to make something expensive. It’s interesting because it’s the product of a keyboard obsessive’s decade-long quest to make the best possible keyboard, down to developing his own switches and stabilizers, at preposterous expense. It would be a fascinating story even if he’d failed.

But he didn’t.

How to build the best keyboard in the world

You can read about Ryan Norbauer’s journey to develop the Seneca in the other article we just published. The brief version is this: the Seneca is a custom keyboard, a descendant of the aftermarket housings Norbauer used to make for Topre boards, except here it’s not just the housing that’s custom. The entire keyboard is made of parts you can’t get anywhere else, inside a metal chassis manufactured to a frankly unnecessary degree of precision, and hand-assembled in Los Angeles by a small team of mildly famous keyboard nerds. 

It is staggeringly heavy, ungodly expensive, and unbelievably pleasant to type on, in a way that maybe only diehard keyboard enthusiasts will fully appreciate.

For lack of a better word, the Seneca feels permanent. It weighs nearly seven pounds and looks like smooth concrete or worn-down stone. The case is milled aluminum, with a plasma-ceramic oxidized finish that has a warm gray textured look but feels totally smooth. It’s actually hard to pick up; there’s nowhere to curl your fingers under it. It’s supposed to go on your desk and stay there. 

The switches and stabilizers were developed by Norbauer & Co. and are exclusive to the company’s keyboards, which is just the Seneca for right now. They are the most interesting thing about the keyboard — the whole reason I wanted to test it. They’re phenomenal.

The switches are a riff on the Topre capacitive dome design (most famously found in the Happy Hacking Keyboard), but they’re smoother and less wobbly, with a deeper sound. Unlike every other Topre-style switch, they’re designed around MX-style keycaps from the start, so the housings don’t interfere with Cherry-profile keycaps. (This is a bigger deal than it may sound; it means the Seneca works with thousands of aftermarket keycap sets, instead of the bare handful that work with Topre boards). 

The stabilizers, like the switches, took years to develop. They’re hideously complicated and overengineered, finicky to put together, and they’re without a doubt the best stabilizers in the world. There’s no rattle or tick in any of the stabilized keys, and although the spacebar has a deeper thunk than the rest of the keys, it’s not much louder to my ears.

The typing experience is sublime. The keys have a big tactile bump right at the top, a smooth downstroke, and a snappy upstroke. The ones on my review unit are medium weight, which are supposed to feel similar to 45g Topre; there are lighter and heavier options.

The switches are muted, not silenced; silicone rings on the slider soften the upstroke, and there’s a damper between the switch and PCB that quiets the downstroke and prevents coil crunch. (The switches are compatible with third-party silencing rings; I tried an old Silence-X ring, and it worked fine). 

There are gaskets between the switches and the solid brass switchplate, and between the plate and the housing; there’s damping material everywhere. The result is a deep, muted thock, without a hint of ping. 

The keyboard’s info page says, “The gentle sound of the Seneca is often likened to raindrops. It has a soft intentionally vintage-sounding thock without being obtrusively clacky.” Read that in whatever voice you’d like. For what it’s worth, Verge executive editor Jake Kastrenakes, who did not read the info page but did listen to the typing test embedded below, also said it sounded like raindrops. 

Whatever you compare it to, the Seneca sounds and feels great.

The Seneca is available for preorder now, in a first edition of around 100 to 150 units, starting at $3,600. 

The unit I’ve been testing is from Edition Zero — the first production run — which includes 50 that were offered in a private sale last summer to a small group of previous Norbauer clients, as well as a few more for testing, certification, and review.

The Edition Zero Senecas, including my review unit, came with closed-source firmware that doesn’t allow for hardware-based key remapping, which, for me, is the biggest omission. When Norbauer commissioned the firmware half a decade ago, he opted not to include remappability for the sake of simplicity. He deemed software remapping good enough for a keyboard with a standard layout that isn’t meant to be carried from computer to computer.

I do not share that opinion. I program the same function layer into all of my keyboards, and I’m moderately annoyed every time I reach for a shortcut on the Seneca that just isn’t there. But I have to concede that software remapping — I’ve been using Karabiner-Elements on Mac and the PowerToys Keyboard Manager on Windows — is basically tolerable in the short term. But hardware remapping is important on compact keyboards, like the one the company plans to make next. Norbauer is working with Luca Sevá, aka Cipulot — the guy for third-party electrocapacitive PCBs — on new open-source firmware that will allow for remapping. That firmware will be available on the Seneca, probably by the time the First Edition keyboards ship, but wasn’t yet available during my test period.

There are a few other quirks. The Seneca’s custom cable uses USB-C on the computer end and a Lemo connector at the near end. It looks very cool, and it keeps the aesthetic coherent, but if the Seneca is joining a rotation of other keyboards on your desk, it means you have to swap cables every time. On the one hand, if you’re buying a 7-pound, $3,600 keyboard, are you really going to move it off your desk that much? On the other, if you care enough about keyboards to buy this one, you probably do have a lot of nice keyboards you want to rotate between. (Norbauer is working on a short Lemo-to-USB-C dongle, but that also wasn’t ready during the review period.)

The Seneca has a totally flat typing angle. Most mechanical keyboards are higher in the back than the front, with a typing angle between 3 and 11 degrees. Ergonomically, flat (or even negative) is better. There’s an optional riser ($180, made in South Africa from native hardwoods) that gives it a three-degree typing angle, if you prefer. On a whim, I put it backward, giving the keyboard a negative three-degree angle, and now all my other keyboards feel weird. This might be the Seneca’s biggest impact on my life going forward. 

Over the past month or so, I’ve asked a few friends and family members to try typing on the Seneca. Most of them have desk jobs, and most use mechanical keyboards all day long, but they’re not keyboard nerds.

They have been, as a rule, moderately impressed. Everyone thinks it looks nice, and everyone likes the way it feels and sounds, but they are not blown away. It hasn’t ruined them for their Keychrons. Most of them ask where the number pad is. 

On a functional level, the Seneca doesn’t do anything more than a $115 Keychron. Actually, it does less: there’s no wireless, no backlighting, no volume knob, no hotswap switches, and (for now) no firmware remapping. As a machine for typing, it’s peerless, but maybe not in a way that anyone but a keyboard obsessive is going to notice or care about. And that’s fine. 

If you’re selling a keyboard for $3,600, you’ve narrowed your audience to two tiny and overlapping groups. You have to be able to convince the pickiest keyboard nerds on Earth that there’s something about your keyboard they can’t get anywhere else. And you have to convince the nouveau riche coders and status-obsessed desk jockeys that you’ve convinced the keyboard nerds and that this keyboard is worth half an entry-level Rolex. 

Some small number of people who buy the Seneca will surely only do so because it’s beautiful and useful, and they can afford it. And that’s as good a reason as any. But mostly, this is a luxury keyboard for a very specific type of keyboard nerd. If your idea of nice is a preposterously heavy capacitive board, the Seneca is better than anything else you can buy or build. 

You don’t have to spend $3,600 to get an amazing keyboard. Obviously. It’s very easy not to spend $3,600 on a keyboard. You can have a great time with an off-the-shelf board that costs under $100. For less than 10 percent of the Seneca’s price, you can get a barebones kit keyboard, add whatever switches and stabilizers and keycaps you want, and have way more control over the end result than you do with the Seneca. (Strong endorsement here for the Classic-TKL and the Bauer Lite). You can get a Realforce keyboard for $250 and fall in love with the Topre switches that launched Norbauer on the path to the Seneca all those years ago.

If you’re smart, you’ll stop there. Or, if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself a decade later with way more keyboards than computers, half-convinced to spend $3,600 on the nicest keyboard in the world.