Called It: The Anti-Adobe Coalition Is Here

I tweeted this in December 2023, right after the Adobe-Figma deal collapsed: "one good thing about the adobe x figma deal dissolving is we'll see a stronger anti-adobe coalition, built around figma x descript and some emerging ai-first photoshop product."

Nine months later, I was canceling my own Adobe subscription. The retention flow threw everything at me—50% off, tutorials, guilt trips about losing cloud files. But I checked my usage: three months since opening Photoshop, six since Illustrator. Only Lightroom still had me, organizing RAW files from 2010 I never look at.

The migration happened without planning. UI work moved to Figma. Podcast editing to Descript. Quick graphics through Canva. Background removal? now native to Figma. Even Lightroom finally got replaced—Capture One for cataloging, Darkroom for mobile edits. The shift aligned with what I'd written about creative constraints—sometimes less tooling means more creation.

DHH's Omarchy Changes the Game

I've been on Rails since 2008, so I've followed DHH's thinking on defaults and developer experience for years. When he released Omarchy this summer—his opinionated Arch Linux distribution—I recognized the pattern immediately. Same philosophy as Rails: strong defaults, omakase choices, get developers productive fast.

But Omarchy goes deeper than tooling. DHH is moving all of 37signals' Ruby and Ops teams to it over the next three years. Their test suite runs almost twice as fast on Framework desktops running Omarchy compared to Apple's M4 Max. Native Docker, no virtualization overhead, keyboard-first everything.

The timing matters. Framework laptops are growing 400% year-over-year. Developers want modular, repairable hardware they actually own.

Combine Framework's hardware philosophy with Omarchy's software approach, and you get a complete developer stack that rejects both Apple's sealed boxes and Adobe's rental model.

The Figma Platform Play I Saw Coming

Back in June 2023, I tweeted: "Figma can just do it natively. Adobe can/will take over the world not through Dreamweaver, but Figma."

Except Adobe never got Figma. The EU killed the $20 billion deal. Figma went public this year instead, stock doubled day one. Now they're building the platform play I predicted—design-to-code, AI assistants, the whole developer workflow. We're witnessing the design officer moment where aesthetic control becomes infrastructure, with Figma's component systems spreading like DNA across teams.

Every designer who switches brings their team. Every team brings developers. Every developer wants integrations. Linear, Notion, Vercel—all orbiting Figma as the source of truth. This is classic mindshare magic—familiar interfaces delivering surprising experiences, creating viral adoption. Adobe tried to buy this network effect. The DOJ did them a favor by blocking it.

Descript: The One Adobe Should Have Bought

I saw this coming in 2018. Sunny, my housemate, had just talked to Descript about joining as their engineering head. He showed me the demo—edit video by editing text, no timeline at all. I'd spent years in Final Cut, Premiere, After Effects, every timeline tool since the 90s. This was different. I told him: "Go. Now. Don't think about it. This is the future." When you've wrestled with timelines your whole life, seeing someone delete an "um" by highlighting text feels like watching fire get invented.

Four years later, I tweeted: "if Adobe doesn't snatch @DescriptApp in 2023 while it's still 'low', it could need a figma-size check by 2024."

Adobe didn't move. Descript raised $100M instead, becoming the gateway for AI media editing. Their insight was stupid-simple: edit audio like text. Upload recording, get transcript, delete words to delete audio. No timeline scrubbing for "ums" and dead air.

They didn't target video professionals married to Premiere's timeline. They found podcasters, educators, marketers—people with content but no patience for traditional editing. Now those users expect AI transcription, filler word removal, studio sound with one click.

Adobe's playing catch-up in a category Descript invented.

Rails Lessons Apply Everywhere

Having shipped production Rails since 2008, I recognize the pattern. Rails taught us that opinionated defaults beat infinite configuration. Convention over configuration. The same philosophy now spreading through the entire stack. I wrote about this tool polygamy problem—the constant switching costs versus deep mastery gains. It aligns with why lower abstraction skills last longer: focused tools that expose fundamentals trump high-abstraction suites that hide them.

Omarchy applies Rails thinking to Linux. Instead of spending weeks configuring Arch and Hyprland, you get DHH's choices out of the box. Neovim, ripgrep, fzf, zoxide—the hits everyone eventually installs anyway.

But there's something deeper happening. DHH used AI to basically ask: "What would the average Reddit/Hacker News power user install on their Linux box in 2025?" The result is Omarchy—an operating system that's literally the median expert consensus. Every package, every config, every keybinding represents what an LLM trained on internet discussions would recommend. Omarchy is what happens when you let ChatGPT design your dev environment based on collective wisdom.

Average? Absolutely. But that's the genius. Average means predictable, documentable, debuggable, shareable. When your OS is what everyone else would build anyway, Stack Overflow always has your answer. The paradox: by embracing the median, DHH created something radical—a Linux distro that thousands can actually use immediately.

The anti-Adobe coalition works the same way. Each tool picks its lane, does one thing excellently, integrates with everything else. Figma for UI. Descript for media. Midjourney for generation. Notion for docs. The monolith dissolves into microservices, but microservices that actually talk to each other.

The File Format Liberation

Adobe's real moat was never features—it was file formats. PSD files only Photoshop could read properly. Premiere projects that locked your edits. After Effects compositions that broke elsewhere.

The coalition killed this through radical openness. Figma publishes their format spec. Descript exports standard MP4s with separate transcripts. AI tools generate vanilla PNGs. When everyone reads everyone's outputs, lock-in evaporates.

APIs finish the job. Why export/import when tools talk directly? Pull designs from Figma's API, transform Notion pages to structured data, generate images via Midjourney's endpoints. The creative pipeline becomes programmable.

What's Actually Happening

Students learn Figma, not Illustrator. Indie developers run Omarchy on Framework laptops. Podcasters edit in Descript without knowing what a timeline is. The edge cases move first—always do. Enterprise follows five years later when the new generation refuses the old tools.

Adobe keeps adding AI—Firefly, neural filters, content-aware everything. Impressive tech, backwards strategy. They're adding $60/month AI to suites while Runway charges $15 for video generation, ElevenLabs $5 for voice cloning.

The bundle assumes you need everything, the way the bundle is presenting it. Reality: you need three things done perfectly. Once specialized tools nail those three things, the suite becomes overhead.

Watching the Signals

Every industry with bundled complexity faces this. Maya at $1,875/year while indie game devs use Blender free. Pro Tools at $599/year while bedroom producers run Reaper for $60.

The patterns are predictable:

• GitHub stars climbing on niche tools
• Discord servers full of workflow hacks
• YouTube tutorials for workarounds
• Influential shops (like 37signals) publicly switching
• Terms of Service backlash (Adobe's 2024 "we can use your content" fiasco)
• Failed acquisitions (Adobe-Figma) keeping insurgents independent, and sometimes granting them $1B in the process.

The Coalition Compounds

Framework and Omarchy never coordinated, yet they solve the same problem: professionals wanting to own their tools. Figma and Descript never strategized together, yet they're dismantling Adobe's bundle from opposite ends.

Regulation didn't create this—it just cleared oxygen. The EU blocking Adobe-Figma, forcing Apple to open iOS—these create space for coalitions to form. Not through planning, but through aligned incentives.

My Rails brain loves this. Convention over configuration at industry scale. Each tool doing one thing well, Unix philosophy for creative work. The majestic monolith giving way to focused excellence.

The underground isn't underground anymore. We're all finding each other in Figma comments, Descript tutorials, Omarchy forums. Turns out the anti-Adobe coalition I predicted wasn't a conspiracy—it was inevitable.

Adobe's watching their moat evaporate one canceled subscription at a time. Figma proved design doesn't need Illustrator. Descript proved editing doesn't need Premiere. Omarchy and Framework prove developers don't need macOS.

The tools want to be free. The coalition's just helping them along.