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My favorite kind of update is the one that gives my gadgets entirely new features and specs for free - and Microsoft is unleashing one of those today by bringing Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio to its 2024 Xbox Wireless Headset, which unlocks a lot of those new features!

It could bring better battery life, lower latency, and perhaps most importantly, palatable voice chat when paired with Microsoft's "Xbox" handhelds like the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X. (The older Bluetooth Classic mode requires more bandwidth than Bluetooth LE, so you typically see a big drop in audio quality with Bluetooth Classic when you try to add two-way voice communica …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Kotlin 2.3.0 release is out! This version includes new language features, stable ones, and other features now enabled by default. This release also brings tooling updates, performance improvements for different platforms, and important fixes. Here are some additional highlights from this release:

• Language: More stable and default features, unused return value checker, explicit backing fields, and changes to context-sensitive resolution.
• Kotlin/JVM: Support for Java 25.
• Kotlin/Native: Improved interop through Swift export, faster build time for release tasks, C and Objective-C library import in Beta.
• Kotlin/Wasm: Fully qualified names and new exception handling proposal enabled by default, as well as new compact storage for Latin-1 characters.
• Kotlin/JS: New experimental suspend function export, LongArray representation, unified companion object access, and more.
• Gradle: Compatibility with Gradle 9.0 and a new API for registering generated sources.
• Compose compiler: Stack traces for minified Android applications.
• Standard library: Stable time tracking functionality and improved UUID generation and parsing.

For the complete list of changes, refer to What’s new in Kotlin 2.3.0 or the release notes on GitHub.

How to install Kotlin 2.3.0

The Kotlin plugin is distributed as a bundled plugin in IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio.

To update to the new Kotlin version, change the Kotlin version to 2.3.0 in your build scripts.

If you need the command-line compiler, download it from the GitHub release page.

If you run into any problems:

• Find help on Slack (get an invite).
• Report issues to our issue tracker, YouTrack.

Top issue reporters from YouTrack

Ryan Nett (39 issues), Jinseong Jeon (25 issues), Andreas Malik (25 issues), Aviroop Pal (15 issues), Pau M (13 issues), Zac Sweers (13 issues), Youssef Shoaib (13 issues), Ivan Canet (12 issues), Martin Bonnin (12 issues), Victor Turansky (12 issues), xyzboom (11 issues), Łukasz Wasylkowski (10 issues), Donald Duo Zhao (10 issues), Nickolay Viuginov (9 issues), Rick Clephas (8 issues), Vadim Shabanov (7 issues), Gleb Minaev (7 issues), Oliver O. (7 issues), Alexander Nozik (7 issues), and Sergey Igushkin (7 issues).

External contributors

We’d like to thank all of our contributors whose pull requests were included in this release:

Andrei Shikov, Troels Bjerre Lund, Derek Xu, Johan Bay, aviroop, Alex Sokol / y9san9, Jinseong Jeon, Xin Wang, Yijie Jiang, Dave MacLachlan, Jaebaek Seo, Nikita Nazarov, cketti, Charles Lgn, Chuck Jazdzewski, Colin Cross, David Khol, Hakan Mehmed, Iven Krall, Kotcrab, Leon Linhart, Matthew Gharrity, Yasuhisa Honda, Zac Sweers, freya02, jitokim, jonghoonpark, zangzhicong

Special thanks to our EAP Champions

• Yang
• Rick Clephas
• Bernd Prünster
• Benoit Lubek
• David Lopez
• Florian Schreiber
• Sechaba
• Dayan Ruben
• Zac Sweers
• Alexander Nozik
• Jake Wharton
• Łukasz Wasylkowski
• Mohamed Rejeb
• Anderson Lameck
• Yuri Geronimus
• Johannes Svensson
• Kacper Wojciechowski

What else to read

• What’s new in Kotlin 2.3.0 documentation
• Kotlin 2.3.0 compatibility guide
• Kotlin EAP Champions

From tough questions to standout answers, your team built a lot in 2025. Your 2025 Stacked brings those contributions together in one shareable snapshot—celebrating the people, posts, and topics that defined your year in Stack Internal.

What version of Windows do I have? This is a far more common question than we’d think. Checking the OS version is important in software packaging and deployment, especially in the modern world. Each new OS version may include new functionality that third-party software developers can use. In cases like this, it is recommended to first check the actual OS version before installing or updating the software. [...]

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