Bose re­leased the Application Programming Interface (API) doc­u­men­ta­tion for its SoundTouch speak­ers to­day, putting a sil­ver lin­ing around the im­pend­ing end-of-life (EoL) of the ex­pen­sive home the­ater de­vices.

In October, Bose an­nounced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speak­ers and sound­bars would be­come dumb speak­ers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speak­ers would only work if a de­vice was con­nected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher la­tency than Wi-Fi).

After that date, the speak­ers would stop re­ceiv­ing se­cu­rity and soft­ware up­dates and lose cloud con­nec­tiv­ity and their com­pan­ion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based com­pany said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to in­te­grate the de­vice with mu­sic ser­vices, such as Spotify, have mul­ti­ple SoundTouch de­vices play the same au­dio si­mul­ta­ne­ously, or use or edit saved pre­sets.

The an­nounce­ment frus­trated some of Bose’s long-time cus­tomers, some of whom own mul­ti­ple SoundTouch de­vices that still func­tion prop­erly. Many ques­tioned com­pa­nies’ in­creas­ingly com­mon prac­tice of brick­ing ex­pen­sive prod­ucts to fo­cus on new de­vices or to min­i­mize costs, or be­cause they’ve gone through ac­qui­si­tions or bank­ruptcy. SoundTouch speak­ers re­leased in 2013 and 2015 with prices rang­ing from $399 to $1,500.

Today, Bose had bet­ter news. In an email to cus­tomers, Bose an­nounced that AirPlay and Spotify Connect will still work with SoundTouch speak­ers af­ter EoL, ex­pand­ing the wire­less ca­pa­bil­i­ties that peo­ple will still be able to ac­cess.

Additionally, SoundTouch de­vices that sup­port AirPlay 2 will be able to play the same au­dio si­mul­ta­ne­ously.

The SoundTouch app will also live on, al­beit stripped of some func­tion­al­ity.

“On May 6, 2026, the app will up­date to a ver­sion that sup­ports the func­tions that can op­er­ate lo­cally with­out the cloud. No ac­tion will be re­quired on your part. Opening the app will ap­ply the up­date au­to­mat­i­cally,” Bose said.

A lot has al­ready been said about the ab­surdly large cor­ner ra­dius of win­dows on ma­cOS Tahoe. People are call­ing the way it looks com­i­cal, like a child’s toy, or down­right in­sane.

Setting all the aes­thetic is­sues aside — which are to some ex­tent a mat­ter of taste — it also comes at a cost in terms of us­abil­ity.

Since up­grad­ing to ma­cOS Tahoe, I’ve no­ticed that quite of­ten my at­tempts to re­size a win­dow are fail­ing.

This never hap­pened to me be­fore in al­most 40 years of us­ing com­put­ers. So why all of a sud­den?

It turns out that my ini­tial click in the win­dow cor­ner in­stinc­tively hap­pens in an area where the win­dow does­n’t re­spond to it. The win­dow ex­pects this click to hap­pen in an area of 19 × 19 pix­els, lo­cated near the win­dow cor­ner.

If the win­dow had no rounded cor­ners at all, 62% of that area would lie in­side the win­dow:

But due to the huge cor­ner ra­dius in Tahoe, most of it — about 75% — now lies out­side the win­dow:

Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t ac­tu­ally touch them:

So I in­stinc­tively try to grab the win­dow cor­ner in­side the win­dow, typ­i­cally some­where in that green area, near the blue dot:

And I as­sume that most peo­ple would also in­tu­itively ex­pect to be able to grab the cor­ner there. But no, that’s al­ready out­side the ac­cepted tar­get area:

So, for ex­am­ple, grab­bing it here does not work:

But guess what — grab­bing it here does:

So in the end, the most re­li­able way to re­size a win­dow in Tahoe is to grab it out­side the cor­ner — a ges­ture that feels un­nat­ural and un­in­tu­itive, and is there­fore in­evitably er­ror-prone.

is a news writer cov­er­ing all things con­sumer tech. Stevie started out at Laptop Mag writ­ing news and re­views on hard­ware, gam­ing, and AI.

Posts from this au­thor will be added to your daily email di­gest and your home­page feed.

Posts from this au­thor will be added to your daily email di­gest and your home­page feed.

In a sur­pris­ingly user-friendly move, Bose has an­nounced it will be open-sourc­ing the API doc­u­men­ta­tion for its SoundTouch smart speak­ers, which were slated to lose of­fi­cial sup­port on February 18th, as re­ported by Ars Technica. Bose has also moved that date back to May 6th, 2026.

When cloud sup­port ends, an up­date to the SoundTouch app will add lo­cal con­trols to re­tain as much func­tion­al­ity as pos­si­ble with­out cloud ser­vices. Users will still be able to stream mu­sic to SoundTouch speak­ers with Bluetooth, AirPlay, and Spotify Connect (plus phys­i­cal AUX con­nec­tions). Remote con­trol fea­tures and group­ing speak­ers will also con­tinue to work, and users will still be able to set up and con­fig­ure their SoundTouch speak­ers.

Now that the smart speak­ers’ API is be­ing open-sourced, users can also cre­ate their own com­pat­i­ble SoundTouch tools to help fill in any gaps left by the lack of cloud ser­vices. While it’s still dis­ap­point­ing that the speak­ers are los­ing of­fi­cial sup­port, Bose’s ap­proach at least lets peo­ple con­tinue us­ing their speak­ers, rather than brick­ing oth­er­wise func­tional de­vices.

This move from Bose is par­tic­u­larly sur­pris­ing be­cause of how rare it is. Usually when prod­ucts lose sup­port for cloud ser­vices, they end up bricked, and oc­ca­sion­ally users step in them­selves to fix things. For in­stance, when Pebble orig­i­nally shut down in 2016, users kept their watches func­tional by cre­at­ing the Rebble Alliance, a com­mu­nity-run re­place­ment for the watch­es’ cloud ser­vices, firmware, and app store.

Follow top­ics and au­thors from this story to see more like this in your per­son­al­ized home­page feed and to re­ceive email up­dates.

When we re­leased Claude Code, we ex­pected de­vel­op­ers to use it for cod­ing. They did—and then quickly be­gan us­ing it for al­most every­thing else. This prompted us to build Cowork: a sim­pler way for any­one—not just de­vel­op­ers—to work with Claude in the very same way. Cowork is avail­able to­day as a re­search pre­view for Claude Max sub­scribers on our ma­cOS app, and we will im­prove it rapidly from here.

How is us­ing Cowork dif­fer­ent from a reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tion? In Cowork, you give Claude ac­cess to a folder of your choos­ing on your com­puter. Claude can then read, edit, or cre­ate files in that folder. It can, for ex­am­ple, re-or­ga­nize your down­loads by sort­ing and re­nam­ing each file, cre­ate a new spread­sheet with a list of ex­penses from a pile of screen­shots, or pro­duce a first draft of a re­port from your scat­tered notes.

In Cowork, Claude com­pletes work like this with much more agency than you’d see in a reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tion. Once you’ve set it a task, Claude will make a plan and steadily com­plete it, while loop­ing you in on what it’s up to. If you’ve used Claude Code, this will feel fa­mil­iar—Cowork is built on the very same foun­da­tions. This means Cowork can take on many of the same tasks that Claude Code can han­dle, but in a more ap­proach­able form for non-cod­ing tasks.

When you’ve mas­tered the ba­sics, you can make Cowork more pow­er­ful still. Claude can use your ex­ist­ing con­nec­tors, which link Claude to ex­ter­nal in­for­ma­tion, and in Cowork we’ve added an ini­tial set of skills that im­prove Claude’s abil­ity to cre­ate doc­u­ments, pre­sen­ta­tions, and other files. If you pair Cowork with Claude in Chrome, Claude can com­plete tasks that re­quire browser ac­cess, too.

Cowork is de­signed to make us­ing Claude for new work as sim­ple as pos­si­ble. You don’t need to keep man­u­ally pro­vid­ing con­text or con­vert­ing Claude’s out­puts into the right for­mat. Nor do you have to wait for Claude to fin­ish be­fore of­fer­ing fur­ther ideas or feed­back: you can queue up tasks and let Claude work through them in par­al­lel. It feels much less like a back-and-forth and much more like leav­ing mes­sages for a coworker.

In Cowork, you can choose which fold­ers and con­nec­tors Claude can see: Claude can’t read or edit any­thing you don’t give it ex­plicit ac­cess to. Claude will also ask be­fore tak­ing any sig­nif­i­cant ac­tions, so you can steer or course-cor­rect it as you need.

That said, there are still things to be aware of be­fore you give Claude con­trol. By de­fault, the main thing to know is that Claude can take po­ten­tially de­struc­tive ac­tions (such as delet­ing lo­cal files) if it’s in­structed to. Since there’s al­ways some chance that Claude might mis­in­ter­pret your in­struc­tions, you should give Claude very clear guid­ance around things like this.

You should also be aware of the risk of “prompt in­jec­tions”: at­tempts by at­tack­ers to al­ter Claude’s plans through con­tent it might en­counter on the in­ter­net. We’ve built so­phis­ti­cated de­fenses against prompt in­jec­tions, but agent safety—that is, the task of se­cur­ing Claude’s real-world ac­tions—is still an ac­tive area of de­vel­op­ment in the in­dus­try.

These risks aren’t new with Cowork, but it might be the first time you’re us­ing a more ad­vanced tool that moves be­yond a sim­ple con­ver­sa­tion. We rec­om­mend tak­ing pre­cau­tions, par­tic­u­larly while you learn how it works. We pro­vide more de­tail in our Help Center.

This is a re­search pre­view. We’re re­leas­ing Cowork early be­cause we want to learn what peo­ple use it for, and how they think it could be bet­ter. We en­cour­age you to ex­per­i­ment with what Cowork can do for you, and to try things you don’t ex­pect to work: you might be sur­prised! As we learn more from this pre­view, we plan to make lots of im­prove­ments (including by adding cross-de­vice sync and bring­ing it to Windows), and we’ll iden­tify fur­ther ways to make it safer.

Claude Max sub­scribers can try Cowork now by down­load­ing the ma­cOS app, then click­ing on “Cowork” in the side­bar. If you’re on an­other plan, you can join the wait­list for fu­ture ac­cess.

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Better health be­gins on your plate—not in your med­i­cine cab­i­net.

The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans de­fines real food as whole, nu­tri­ent-dense, and nat­u­rally oc­cur­ring, plac­ing them back at the cen­ter of our di­ets. The State of Our Health50% of Americans have 75% of adults re­port hav­ing at least one 90% of U.S. health­care spend­ing goes to treat­ing —much of which is linked to diet and lifestyle We are end­ing the war on pro­tein. Every meal must pri­or­i­tize high-qual­ity, nu­tri­ent-dense pro­tein from both an­i­mal and plant sources, paired with healthy fats from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meats, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives, and av­o­ca­dos.Pro­tein tar­get: ~0.54–0.73 grams per pound of body weight per dayVeg­eta­bles and fruits are es­sen­tial to real food nu­tri­tion. Eat a wide va­ri­ety of whole, col­or­ful, nu­tri­ent-dense veg­eta­bles and fruits in their orig­i­nal form, pri­or­i­tiz­ing fresh­ness and min­i­mal pro­cess­ing.Whole grains are en­cour­aged. Refined car­bo­hy­drates are not. Prioritize fiber-rich whole grains and sig­nif­i­cantly re­duce the con­sump­tion of highly processed, re­fined car­bo­hy­drates that dis­place real nour­ish­ment.What is the New Pyramid?The New Pyramid is a sim­ple guide de­signed to help Americans eat real, whole foods more con­sis­tently. It pri­or­i­tizes nu­tri­ent-dense foods and re­duces re­liance on highly processed prod­ucts, us­ing mod­ern nu­tri­tion sci­ence to sup­port every­day health.What does “Eat Real Food” mean?Eat­ing real food means choos­ing foods that are whole or min­i­mally processed and rec­og­niz­able as food. These foods are pre­pared with few in­gre­di­ents and with­out added sug­ars, in­dus­trial oils, ar­ti­fi­cial fla­vors, or preser­v­a­tives.Why does the New Pyramid em­pha­size pro­tein and veg­eta­bles?Pro­tein and veg­eta­bles form the foun­da­tion of real food meals. Together, they sup­port mus­cle health, meta­bolic func­tion, gut health, and sta­ble en­ergy while nat­u­rally crowd­ing out highly processed foods.Yes. Healthy fats are a nat­ural part of real foods such as meat, seafood, dairy, nuts, olives, and av­o­ca­dos. These fats sup­port brain health, hor­mone func­tion, and nu­tri­ent ab­sorp­tion when con­sumed in their nat­ural forms.How does the New Pyramid ad­dress added sug­ars?Added sug­ars are not part of eat­ing real foods and are not rec­om­mended. The New Pyramid en­cour­ages avoid­ing added sug­ars en­tirely, es­pe­cially for chil­dren, while al­low­ing nat­u­rally oc­cur­ring sug­ars found in whole fruits and plain dairy.Where do grains fit in the New Pyramid?Grains can be part of a real food diet when eaten in whole or tra­di­tion­ally pre­pared forms. Foods like oats, rice, and true sour­dough are pre­ferred. Refined and pack­aged grain prod­ucts should be lim­ited.Hy­dra­tion mat­ters. Choose wa­ter or unsweet­ened bev­er­ages to ac­com­pany meals and snacks.Is the New Pyramid a strict diet?No. The New Pyramid is a flex­i­ble frame­work meant to guide bet­ter choices, not dic­tate ex­act meals. It sup­ports cul­tural tra­di­tions, per­sonal pref­er­ences, and dif­fer­ent lifestyles while re­in­forc­ing one core goal: eat real foods most of the time.Ex­plore the re­search, rec­om­men­da­tions, and im­ple­men­ta­tion guid­ance that shape the Dietary Guidelines, in­clud­ing the sci­ence, the pol­icy guid­ance, and the every­day serv­ing frame­work.

I love writ­ing soft­ware, line by line. It could be said that my ca­reer was a con­tin­u­ous ef­fort to cre­ate soft­ware well writ­ten, min­i­mal, where the hu­man touch was the fun­da­men­tal fea­ture. I also hope for a so­ci­ety where the last are not for­got­ten. Moreover, I don’t want AI to eco­nom­i­cally suc­ceed, I don’t care if the cur­rent eco­nomic sys­tem is sub­verted (I could be very happy, hon­estly, if it goes in the di­rec­tion of a mas­sive re­dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth). But, I would not re­spect my­self and my in­tel­li­gence if my idea of soft­ware and so­ci­ety would im­pair my vi­sion: facts are facts, and AI is go­ing to change pro­gram­ming for­ever.

In 2020 I left my job in or­der to write a novel about AI, uni­ver­sal ba­sic in­come, a so­ci­ety that adapted to the au­toma­tion of work fac­ing many chal­lenges. At the very end of 2024 I opened a YouTube chan­nel fo­cused on AI, its use in cod­ing tasks, its po­ten­tial so­cial and eco­nom­i­cal ef­fects. But while I rec­og­nized what was go­ing to hap­pen very early, I thought that we had more time be­fore pro­gram­ming would be com­pletely re­shaped, at least a few years. I no longer be­lieve this is the case. Recently, state of the art LLMs are able to com­plete large sub­tasks or medium size pro­jects alone, al­most unas­sisted, given a good set of hints about what the end re­sult should be. The de­gree of suc­cess you’ll get is re­lated to the kind of pro­gram­ming you do (the more iso­lated, and the more tex­tu­ally rep­re­sentable, the bet­ter: sys­tem pro­gram­ming is par­tic­u­larly apt), and to your abil­ity to cre­ate a men­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the prob­lem to com­mu­ni­cate to the LLM. But, in gen­eral, it is now clear that for most pro­jects, writ­ing the code your­self is no longer sen­si­ble, if not to have fun.

In the past week, just prompt­ing, and in­spect­ing the code to pro­vide guid­ance from time to time, in a few hours I did the fol­low­ing four tasks, in hours in­stead of weeks:

1. I mod­i­fied my linenoise li­brary to sup­port UTF-8, and cre­ated a frame­work for line edit­ing test­ing that uses an em­u­lated ter­mi­nal that is able to re­port what is get­ting dis­played in each char­ac­ter cell. Something that I al­ways wanted to do, but it was hard to jus­tify the work needed just to test a side pro­ject of mine. But if you can just de­scribe your idea, and it ma­te­ri­al­izes in the code, things are very dif­fer­ent.

2. I fixed tran­sient fail­ures in the Redis test. This is very an­noy­ing work, tim­ing re­lated is­sues, TCP dead­lock con­di­tions, and so forth. Claude Code it­er­ated for all the time needed to re­pro­duce it, in­spected the state of the processes to un­der­stand what was hap­pen­ing, and fixed the bugs.

3. Yesterday I wanted a pure C li­brary that would be able to do the in­fer­ence of BERT like em­bed­ding mod­els. Claude Code cre­ated it in 5 min­utes. Same out­put and same speed (15% slower) than PyTorch. 700 lines of code. A Python tool to con­vert the GTE-small model.

4. In the past weeks I op­er­ated changes to Redis Streams in­ter­nals. I had a de­sign doc­u­ment for the work I did. I tried to give it to Claude Code and it re­pro­duced my work in, like, 20 min­utes or less (mostly be­cause I’m slow at check­ing and au­tho­riz­ing to run the com­mands needed).

It is sim­ply im­pos­si­ble not to see the re­al­ity of what is hap­pen­ing. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more in­ter­est­ing to un­der­stand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this sec­ond part, LLMs are great part­ners, too). It does not mat­ter if AI com­pa­nies will not be able to get their money back and the stock mar­ket will crash. All that is ir­rel­e­vant, in the long run. It does not mat­ter if this or the other CEO of some uni­corn is telling you some­thing that is off putting, or ab­surd. Programming changed for­ever, any­way.

How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was in­gested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, be­cause I see this as a con­tin­u­a­tion of what I tried to do all my life: de­moc­ra­tiz­ing code, sys­tems, knowl­edge. LLMs are go­ing to help us to write bet­ter soft­ware, faster, and will al­low small teams to have a chance to com­pete with big­ger com­pa­nies. The same thing open source soft­ware did in the 90s.

However, this tech­nol­ogy is far too im­por­tant to be in the hands of a few com­pa­nies. For now, you can do the pre-train­ing bet­ter or not, you can do re­in­force­ment learn­ing in a much more ef­fec­tive way than oth­ers, but the open mod­els, es­pe­cially the ones pro­duced in China, con­tinue to com­pete (even if they are be­hind) with fron­tier mod­els of closed labs. There is a suf­fi­cient de­moc­ra­ti­za­tion of AI, so far, even if im­per­fect. But: it is ab­solutely not ob­vi­ous that it will be like that for­ever. I’m scared about the cen­tral­iza­tion. At the same time, I be­lieve neural net­works, at scale, are sim­ply able to do in­cred­i­ble things, and that there is not enough “magic” in­side cur­rent fron­tier AI for the other labs and teams not to catch up (otherwise it would be very hard to ex­plain, for in­stance, why OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are so near in their re­sults, for years now).

As a pro­gram­mer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to im­prove cer­tain repos­i­to­ries of mine aban­doned for time con­cerns. I want to ap­ply AI to my Redis work­flow. Improve the Vector Sets im­ple­men­ta­tion and then other data struc­tures, like I’m do­ing with Streams now.

But I’m wor­ried for the folks that will get fired. It is not clear what the dy­namic at play will be: will com­pa­nies try to have more peo­ple, and to build more? Or will they try to cut salary costs, hav­ing fewer pro­gram­mers that are bet­ter at prompt­ing? And, there are other sec­tors where hu­mans will be­come com­pletely re­place­able, I fear.

What is the so­cial so­lu­tion, then? Innovation can’t be taken back af­ter all. I be­lieve we should vote for gov­ern­ments that rec­og­nize what is hap­pen­ing, and are will­ing to sup­port those who will re­main job­less. And, the more peo­ple get fired, the more po­lit­i­cal pres­sure there will be to vote for those who will guar­an­tee a cer­tain de­gree of pro­tec­tion. But I also look for­ward to the good AI could bring: new progress in sci­ence, that could help lower the suf­fer­ing of the hu­man con­di­tion, which is not al­ways happy.

Anyway, back to pro­gram­ming. I have a sin­gle sug­ges­tion for you, my friend. Whatever you be­lieve about what the Right Thing should be, you can’t con­trol it by re­fus­ing what is hap­pen­ing right now. Skipping AI is not go­ing to help you or your ca­reer. Think about it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five min­utes test where you can just re­in­force your own be­liefs. Find a way to mul­ti­ply your­self, and if it does not work for you, try again every few months.

Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn cod­ing, and now ma­chines are do­ing it for you. But what was the fire in­side you, when you coded till night to see your pro­ject work­ing? It was build­ing. And now you can build more and bet­ter, if you find your way to use AI ef­fec­tively. The fun is still there, un­touched.

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Apple is join­ing forces with Google to power its ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence fea­tures, in­clud­ing a ma­jor Siri up­grade ex­pected later this year.

The mul­ti­year part­ner­ship will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud tech­nol­ogy for fu­ture Apple foun­da­tional mod­els, ac­cord­ing to a joint state­ment ob­tained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

“After care­ful eval­u­a­tion, we de­ter­mined that Google’s tech­nol­ogy pro­vides the most ca­pa­ble foun­da­tion for Apple Foundation Models and we’re ex­cited about the in­no­v­a­tive new ex­pe­ri­ences it will un­lock for our users,” Apple said in a state­ment Monday.

The mod­els will con­tinue to run on Apple de­vices and the com­pa­ny’s pri­vate cloud com­pute, the com­pa­nies added.

Apple de­clined to com­ment on the terms of the deal. Google re­ferred CNBC to the joint state­ment.

In August, Bloomberg re­ported that Apple was in early talks with Google to use a cus­tom Gemini model to power a new it­er­a­tion of Siri. The news out­let later re­ported that Apple was plan­ning to pay about $1 bil­lion a year to uti­lize Google AI.

The deal is an­other ma­jor in­di­ca­tor of grow­ing trust in Google’s ac­cel­er­at­ing AI agenda and come­back against OpenAI. In 2025, the search gi­ant logged its best year since 2009 and sur­passed Apple in mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion last week for the first time since 2019.

Google al­ready pays Apple bil­lions each year to be the de­fault search en­gine on iPhones. But that lu­cra­tive part­ner­ship briefly came into ques­tion af­ter Google was found to hold an il­le­gal in­ter­net search mo­nop­oly.

In September, a judge ruled against a worst-case sce­nario out­come that could have forced Google to di­vest its Chrome browser busi­ness.

The de­ci­sion also al­lowed Google to con­tinue to make deals such as the one with Apple.

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On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury sub­poe­nas, threat­en­ing a crim­i­nal in­dict­ment re­lated to my tes­ti­mony be­fore the Senate Banking Committee last June. That tes­ti­mony con­cerned in part a multi-year pro­ject to ren­o­vate his­toric Federal Reserve of­fice build­ings.

I have deep re­spect for the rule of law and for ac­count­abil­ity in our democ­racy. No one—cer­tainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve—is above the law. But this un­prece­dented ac­tion should be seen in the broader con­text of the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s threats and on­go­ing pres­sure.

This new threat is not about my tes­ti­mony last June or about the ren­o­va­tion of the Federal Reserve build­ings. It is not about Congress’s over­sight role; the Fed through tes­ti­mony and other pub­lic dis­clo­sures made every ef­fort to keep Congress in­formed about the ren­o­va­tion pro­ject. Those are pre­texts. The threat of crim­i­nal charges is a con­se­quence of the Federal Reserve set­ting in­ter­est rates based on our best as­sess­ment of what will serve the pub­lic, rather than fol­low­ing the pref­er­ences of the President.

This is about whether the Fed will be able to con­tinue to set in­ter­est rates based on ev­i­dence and eco­nomic con­di­tions—or whether in­stead mon­e­tary pol­icy will be di­rected by po­lit­i­cal pres­sure or in­tim­i­da­tion.

I have served at the Federal Reserve un­der four ad­min­is­tra­tions, Republicans and Democrats alike. In every case, I have car­ried out my du­ties with­out po­lit­i­cal fear or fa­vor, fo­cused solely on our man­date of price sta­bil­ity and max­i­mum em­ploy­ment. Public ser­vice some­times re­quires stand­ing firm in the face of threats. I will con­tinue to do the job the Senate con­firmed me to do, with in­tegrity and a com­mit­ment to serv­ing the American peo­ple.

There. That’s out of the way. I re­cently in­stalled Linux on my main desk­top com­puter and work lap­top, over­writ­ing the Windows par­ti­tion com­pletely. Essentially, I deleted the pri­mary op­er­at­ing sys­tem from the two com­put­ers I use the most, day in and day out, in­stead trust­ing all of my per­sonal and work com­put­ing needs to the Open Source com­mu­nity. This has been a grow­ing trend, and I hopped on the band­wagon, but for good rea­sons. Some of those rea­sons might per­tain to you and con­vince you to fi­nally make the jump as well. Here’s my ex­pe­ri­ence.

It’s no se­cret that Windows 11 har­vests data like a pump­kin farmer in October, and there is no easy way (and some­times no way at all) to stop it. The op­er­at­ing sys­tem it­self acts ex­actly like what was called “spyware” a decade or so ago, pulling every piece of data it can about its cur­rent user. This data in­cludes (but is far from lim­ited to) hard­ware in­for­ma­tion, spe­cific apps and soft­ware used, us­age trends, and more. With the ad­vent of AI, Microsoft made head­lines with Copilot, an ar­ti­fi­cial as­sis­tant de­signed to help users by cap­tur­ing their data with tools like Recall. It turns out that Copilot has largely been a flop and helps Microsoft (and data thieves) more than its users.

Why are so many ar­ti­cles and YouTube videos lately re­gal­ing read­ers and watch­ers with the har­row­ing tales of techies switch­ing from Windows to Linux? Anyone who has read one of those ar­ti­cles or watched one of those videos will know it boils down to two main is­sues: teleme­try and poor soft­ware sta­bil­ity.

After deal­ing with these is­sues and try­ing to solve them with workarounds, I dual-booted a Linux par­ti­tion for a few weeks. After a Windows up­date (that I did­n’t choose to do) wiped that par­ti­tion and, con­se­quently, the Linux in­stal­la­tion, I de­cided to go whole-hog: I deleted Windows 11 and used the en­tire drive for Linux.

The other main rea­son folks unin­stall Windows is due to the over­all poor soft­ware ex­pe­ri­ence. Windows 11 has mul­ti­ple set­tings mod­ules to han­dle the same task (such as set­ting up net­work­ing or adding de­vices), and none of them seem to talk to each other. Additionally, each new up­date (which will even­tu­ally be forced upon you) seems to bring more bugs than fixes. Personally, I en­coun­tered 2-3 full sys­tem crashes a week when I ran Windows 11, and my hard­ware is fairly de­cent: AMD Ryzen 7 6800H, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB PCIe NVMe drive. Still, a few times a week, my com­puter would freeze for a few sec­onds, the dis­plays would go dark, and the PC would ei­ther restart or hang in­def­i­nitely.

There. That’s out of the way. I re­cently in­stalled Linux on my main desk­top com­puter and work lap­top, over­writ­ing the Windows par­ti­tion com­pletely. Essentially, I deleted the pri­mary op­er­at­ing sys­tem from the two com­put­ers I use the most, day in and day out, in­stead trust­ing all of my per­sonal and work com­put­ing needs to the Open Source com­mu­nity. This has been a grow­ing trend, and I hopped on the band­wagon, but for good rea­sons. Some of those rea­sons might per­tain to you and con­vince you to fi­nally make the jump as well. Here’s my ex­pe­ri­ence.

It’s no se­cret that Windows 11 har­vests data like a pump­kin farmer in October, and there is no easy way (and some­times no way at all) to stop it. The op­er­at­ing sys­tem it­self acts ex­actly like what was called “spyware” a decade or so ago, pulling every piece of data it can about its cur­rent user. This data in­cludes (but is far from lim­ited to) hard­ware in­for­ma­tion, spe­cific apps and soft­ware used, us­age trends, and more. With the ad­vent of AI, Microsoft made head­lines with Copilot, an ar­ti­fi­cial as­sis­tant de­signed to help users by cap­tur­ing their data with tools like Recall. It turns out that Copilot has largely been a flop and helps Microsoft (and data thieves) more than its users.

Why are so many ar­ti­cles and YouTube videos lately re­gal­ing read­ers and watch­ers with the har­row­ing tales of techies switch­ing from Windows to Linux? Anyone who has read one of those ar­ti­cles or watched one of those videos will know it boils down to two main is­sues: teleme­try and poor soft­ware sta­bil­ity.

After deal­ing with these is­sues and try­ing to solve them with workarounds, I dual-booted a Linux par­ti­tion for a few weeks. After a Windows up­date (that I did­n’t choose to do) wiped that par­ti­tion and, con­se­quently, the Linux in­stal­la­tion, I de­cided to go whole-hog: I deleted Windows 11 and used the en­tire drive for Linux.

The other main rea­son folks unin­stall Windows is due to the over­all poor soft­ware ex­pe­ri­ence. Windows 11 has mul­ti­ple set­tings mod­ules to han­dle the same task (such as set­ting up net­work­ing or adding de­vices), and none of them seem to talk to each other. Additionally, each new up­date (which will even­tu­ally be forced upon you) seems to bring more bugs than fixes. Personally, I en­coun­tered 2-3 full sys­tem crashes a week when I ran Windows 11, and my hard­ware is fairly de­cent: AMD Ryzen 7 6800H, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB PCIe NVMe drive. Still, a few times a week, my com­puter would freeze for a few sec­onds, the dis­plays would go dark, and the PC would ei­ther restart or hang in­def­i­nitely.

The first ques­tion of­ten asked of Windows refugees mi­grat­ing to Linux is, “Why Linux?” It’s a good ques­tion, and one that needs to be asked be­fore dump­ing Windows for any­thing else. Personally, I tried ma­cOS first. The ex­pe­ri­ence was smooth and easy but ul­ti­mately felt re­stric­tive (installing from third-party de­vel­op­ers, any­one?). Additionally, the only Apple com­puter I have is a 2014 MacBook Air. As such, the lat­est ver­sion of ma­cOS I could ac­tu­ally run is 11 (Big Sur), which was re­leased in 2020. Overall sys­tem op­er­a­tion was quite slug­gish on the older hard­ware, and I knew that time would in­evitably take its toll on the soft­ware ex­pe­ri­ence — apps would soon be out of date and I would­n’t be able to up­date them. I also tried the OpenCore Legacy Patcher to push the lap­top to ma­cOS 13. While per­for­mance im­proved, key fea­tures like iMes­sage and Continuity Camera were ei­ther buggy or flat out re­fused to work. It felt like my lap­top was run­ning in mud with its hands tied be­hind its back. Plus, I needed some­thing for my desk­top. Not want­ing to drop a mort­gage pay­ment or two on new hard­ware, I opted for Linux.

Linux promised me the po­ten­tial of what I wanted - high hard­ware com­pat­i­bil­ity with full soft­ware free­dom. The op­er­at­ing sys­tem can run on pretty much any­thing, and it grants users a huge amount of con­trol over their sys­tem. I tried out a few ditri­bu­tions, or dis­tros, of Linux. A dis­tro is like a “flavor” of Linux, and each one has unique fac­tors (e.g., app/​pack­age man­age­ment, bun­dled user in­ter­face). With most dis­tros, these dif­fer­ences are largely ir­rel­e­vant; most dis­tros of­fer the same main pack­ages as oth­ers.