Here is a quick side by side comparison between Apple Creator Studio and the Adobe Creative Cloud suite.
Each app may be stronger or weaker depending on the use case, workflow, and specific user needs, so this is only a rough equivalence.
Function | Apple | Adobe | Adobe price / month
--------------------|----------------------|---------------------|--------------------
Image editing | Pixelmator Pro | Photoshop | ~USD 20
Video editing | Final Cut Pro | Premiere Pro | ~USD 23
Motion graphics | Motion | After Effects | ~USD 23
Audio production | Logic Pro | Audition | ~USD 23
Video encoding | Compressor | Media Encoder | Included with Premiere Pro
Live audio | MainStage | No direct equivalent| N/A
Docs/presentations | Keynote/Pages/Numbers| Express/Acrobat | ~USD 10 to 24
--------------------|----------------------|---------------------|--------------------
TOTAL | USD 12.99 / month | ~USD 100+ / month |
| (7 apps bundle) | (5 apps separately)|
| | USD 69.99 / month |
| | (bundle 20+ apps) |
Disclaimer: table formatting assisted by ChatGPT (hope it works on HN).
What this misses is that Creative Cloud is much more than a bundle of apps. It includes everything you need around the apps for pro workflows (i.e. fonts, AI, stock, collaboration, etc...).
This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to position themselves as real alternatives and actually gain ground.
MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power users and regular users alike.
Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and others have mature desktops, solid performance, and fewer design decisions that get in the user’s way.
I honestly cannot remember another moment where both major desktop platforms were being questioned this openly at the same time. If Linux is ever going to take advantage of dissatisfaction at scale, this feels like it.
>This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to...actually gain ground.
I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse.
That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to.
An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.
Well put. I dual booted because I still can't trust my CachyOS desktop not to do something surprising during important calls. But damn it is relieving to have full control again.
Linux desktops aren’t all immune to excessive minimalism and UI churn either. Just look at Gnome where they’ve decided it’s good in terms of usability to put all options in a hamburger menu and remove any sorts of sensible config options from the UI (a while back it was basic things like “show icons on the desktop”) to achieve this supposed sleekness.
Also Gnome disappeared after 2, got replaced with Unity in Ubuntu which was a whole new ugly thing, then that got replaced with Gnome3 which is very different from Gnome2, also Xorg got deprecated...
If you applied these standards of critique to Linux UIs, this post would be an entire encyclopedia, indexed by DE. I'd take even the worst modern Mac OS (Lion?) over that.
I feel like people who say this haven't seen KDE in a very long time. On a thinkpad it not only "just works", it works flawlessly, never demands attention without justification (i.e. no ads or superfluous items in notifications), every bit of hardware works, all the special keys, fingerprint reader and it's all recognized and usable and configurable from KDE.
Is there any particular distro you're using KDE on for this to work flawlessly on a Thinkpad? I have a Carbon Gen 6 on Windows 10 but one day will need to migrate. The device itself is sound and reliable.
Linux isn't there (on the desktop), and I doubt it'll ever be. It lacks so much: newbie support, drivers, easy configuration (user friendliness in general), and software. There's so much software that doesn't run on Linux. Linux also lacks mature frameworks that make development for macOS and .NET easy. The only thing desktop linux does well is browsing. That would be enough for most people, but they also have tablets and phones, and no need for a desktop.
It's unusable even with the "user-friendly" distros like Mint and Ubuntu. Starting with the fact that Mint and Ubuntu don't even agree on what window system to use.
I don't understand. First, how is that a problem? Second, why is it the default expectation that different operating systems will have the same set of flaws?
Fragmentation makes compatibility and help-finding more difficult. And newbies do get the expectation that the mainstream options aren't all that different, cause that's what everyone tells them.
You kind of moved the goalpost there. That's different from them being unusable. Windows and OSX are different from each other too, are they unusable as well?
I didn't say that fragmentation is the only thing that makes them unusable, it's just one of many. Yeah it is a big thing though.
People do have difficulty switching between Mac and Windows, but each has critical mass so it's still easy to get help with the finer details. And unrelated to fragmentation, anyone tech literate won't have nearly as many showstopping issues to ask about there in the first place.
The big problem isn't friendliness, it's that you don't buy a laptop with it installed. Most people are not realistically going to install a different operating system, they're going to use the one the laptop comes with.
I am quite sympathetic towards Tuxedo, and am considering to replace my work laptop (a 6yr old MBP) with one of those when it stops working, but those are Apple and gaming laptop prices, not mass market prices.
C#, or rather .NET, is pretty decent. I rate it lower than the macOS frameworks for UI development, but it brings a lot of functionality, which has been refined since the days of Visual Basic. Linux simply doesn't have that development effort. Completely understandable, but it holds Linux back, in particular on the desktop.
If you're not convinced: look at the difference between desktop Linux and Android. Although Android Studio seems to be a bit of a disaster nowadays, there's a lot of development support for Android, and it shows in the 1.6 million apps that have been built for it. Android has got what people crave: easy, slick, user-friendly apps, no technical hassle. It's an uphill battle, and at the same time, the focus is shifting away from desktop. So I think the year of Linux for the desktop will likely never come.
This won't happen until Microsoft Word is available on Linux.
It's like the console wars — different camps say "our console is better, it has more teraflops." In reality, nobody cares about that — buyers will get the console that has the games.
Seriously, I think it depends if you're talking about business or home. For business, sure. For home—and this is quite relevant to the rest of your comment—I think it comes down more to gaming.
We're at the stage where almost any UI change no matter how small on Macs is heavily criticized. It seems a lot of people are getting very upset over a lot of micro detail. There's no way to please all of them. I've upgraded to Tahoe. Honestly, I barely notice any difference. It looks alright. There's very little for me to get upset over here. I'm pretty sure I'm in a bucket that describes the overwhelmingly large majority of users here: indifferent about the changes, overall not too upset, barely notice it.
As for Linux. I also have a Linux laptop with Gnome for light gaming (Manjaro). It's alright. But a bit of a mess from a ux point of view. Linux always was messy on that front. But it works reasonably well.
The point with the distributions that you mention is that they each do things slightly differently, and I would argue in ways that are mostly very superficial. Nobody seems to be able to agree on anything in the Linux world so all you get is a lot of opinionated takes on how stuff should behave and which side of the screen things should live. This package manager over that one.
I've been using Linux on and off for a few decades, so I mostly ignore all the window dressing and attempts to create the ultimate package manager UI, file managers and what not and just use the command line. These things come and go.
It seems many distros are mostly just exercises in creating some theme for Gnome or whatever and imitating whatever the creator liked (Windows 95, Beos, Early versions of OSX, CDE, etc.). There's a few decades of nostalgia to pick from here.
The changes in Tahoe do not fall under the bucket of "no matter how small". We have grown to accept many small, but very annoying changes, starting from disappearing scrollbars to not showing full URL in Safari, to name a few, which were all driven by smaller touchscreens on iPhone/iPad, but with Tahoe things became quite extreme.
I just checked, and Instagram’s password reset flow allows requesting a reset using an email address, a phone number, or even the username [1]. The username is public information, so triggering password reset emails is relatively easy.
I looked into this a bit and I am also skeptical about the leak narrative.
I just checked, and Instagram’s password reset flow allows requesting a reset using an email address, a phone number, or even the username [1]. The username is public information, so triggering password reset emails is relatively easy. At scale you would need IP rotation and some basic automation, but it is not particularly hard to generate a large volume of reset emails and create confusion.
From an attacker’s perspective, this does not grant access to accounts or sensitive data. It mainly causes users to receive unexpected reset emails and possibly panic or change their passwords. That aligns more with nuisance or malice than with a meaningful breach.
I do not have definitive proof, but based on this behavior it seems plausible that the reported wave of reset emails could be explained without any large scale data leak.
> From an attacker’s perspective, this does not grant access to accounts or sensitive data
I think there might be an effort in the "security" snake oil industry to classify publicly available data as some sort of breach. Probably because for a security company it's a quick win finding such a "breach" you can generate publicity with and/or scare clueless executives into buying your solution/consultancy services. I think there was a similar "breach" at Twitter where it turns out it was all publicly-available data users themselves put on their public profile that was scraped.
I've personally had people argue with me that disclosing whether an account was registered was a major breach and do "something" about it, yet refuse to change the registration form to also not disclose that fact (since otherwise we'd have to move the registration process behind an emailed link and ask the user to wait for the confirmation email to continue, killing conversion rates).
The "something" was done, and of course the bad guys promptly moved onto the signup form. But hey as far as I know, we're now secure™.
My Instagram username is <firstinitial><lastname> and I get password reset offers (they say “looks like you’re having trouble logging into Instagram” or something similar) about once a week.
If mailboxes of some people were breached, those reset emails can be used to steal their Instagram accounts. So it can be some other breach being exploited, rather than a vulnerability in Instagram account itself.
Reading this from South America, there is another layer that often gets lost in US-centric discussions like this.
For many people here, the move away from US platforms is not primarily about surveillance, product quality, or even conscious digital sovereignty in the European sense. It is more visceral and historical. There is a long-standing anti-US sentiment rooted in decades of interventionism in Latin America. For some users, avoiding US tech products is simply a symbolic refusal to participate in systems that come from a country associated with coups, economic pressure, and political interference in the region.
This is not necessarily about whether European alternatives are better. Often they are chosen precisely because they are not American. That conversation has been present for years, but it intensified during the Trump era, especially as his international posture became more openly aggressive, erratic, and performative. The image projected abroad is less diplomatic and more about asserting power at any cost.
The recent capture of Nicolás Maduro brought this sentiment back to the surface. This is not about defending Maduro or denying authoritarianism in Venezuela. It is about the methods. The way the US exercises power, bypasses norms, and frames these actions as demonstrations of dominance reinforces long-held distrust, regardless of who the target is.
From this side of the world, it often looks like a superpower acting out of anxiety. A fear of losing its central position as China, Russia, and other actors gain influence. That fear translates into unilateral actions and a public discourse that feels unhinged compared to the more restrained, protocol-driven communication of previous administrations.
So when people here talk about abandoning US platforms, it is not always a tech debate. Sometimes it is a political and emotional one, shaped by memory, history, and how power is experienced from the outside rather than from the center.
Disclaimer: this comment was written in Spanish and translated and edited with the assistance of ChatGPT, which is, admittedly, a US-based tool.
South America is a big place, and there are a lot of countries. The situation isn't this simple. For example, Argentina is historically the most anti-US country of all South America, yet it's government and their supporters celebrated the US attack calling everyone who opposed it "communists" (all this while the government allows Chinese goods to be massively imported). Argentina's government will be trying to make a block of countries that are us-friendly (and be their leader of course).
Also, adding context, argentine elites are pro-us, but not as much as Brazil's elites and their supporters (who wear the US flag in protests)
Only issue I've seen is that sometimes it blocks a poorly implemented cookie popup. This means it can't be handled by Consent-O-Matic either and then the site becomes unresponsive because it's waiting for a cookie choice.
Hopefully this translates into clearer direction for Firefox and better execution across the company, instead of pushing multiple micro products that are likely destined to fail, as Mozilla has done over the past 5+ years.
From his LinkedIn profile [1], his recent roles have been consistently centered on Firefox:
Chief Executive Officer
Dec 2025 - Present · 1 mo
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General Manager of Firefox
Jul 2025 - Dec 2025 · 6 mos
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SVP of Firefox
Dec 2024 - Jul 2025 · 8 mos
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He appears to have a solid background in product thinking, feature development, and UX. If his main focus remains on Firefox, that could be a positive sign for the product and its long term direction.
> Every time I published a new post, I would go to GSC and request indexing for the post URL, and my post would be on Google search results shortly after, as expected.
I doubt this is the actual cause, but I can’t think of any other plausible explanation. One possibility is that repeatedly requesting manual indexing in GSC (Google Search Console), while the same URLs were also being discovered automatically through the sitemap, may have unintentionally triggered a spam or quality signal in Google’s indexing system.
This kind of duplicated or aggressive indexing behavior could be misinterpreted by the algorithm, even if the content itself was legitimate.
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