Exactly. Everything "private" that you post online will become public eventually.
Everyone says "we only store the data temporarily and it's deleted right after" including everyone who didn't do that and got hacked.
But I think we're far too late into this issue by now.
It's 2026 and we still don't have a way to know if our passwords are being stored in a secure way in their databases. What hope do we have to know about how our photos are being handled?
Honestly, I don't like how webp and now jpegxl support both a lossless and lossy mode.
Let's say you want to store images lossless. This means you won't tolerate loss of data. Which means you don't want to risk it by using a codec that will compress the image lossy if you forget to enable a setting.
With PNG there is no way to accidentally make it lossy, which feels a lot safer for cases you want lossless compression.
You can use too few bits of color depth to get lossyness in PNG. More generally, I can't find myself very sympathetic to "I don't want a format that can do X and Y, because I might accidentally select X when I want Y in my software". You might accidentally choose JPG when you want PNG too. Or accidentally resample the image. Or delete your files.
If you want a robust lossless workflow, PNG isn't the answer. Automating the fiddly parts and validating that the automation does what you want is the answer.
PNG can and is often used in a lossy way. Reducing the number of colors so PNG8 can be used instead of PNG24/PNG32 is the most common way to do that. Tools like pngquant exist, and for example Photoshop when exporting to PNG also has an option to reduce the colors, to flatten the image (remove alpha), or to change the colorspace.
16-bit PNG files can easily accidentally be reduced to 8-bit, which is of course a lossy operation. Animated PNG files can easily get converted into a still image (keeping only the first frame). CMYK images will have to be converted to RGB when saving them as PNG, which is also a lossy operation. It can happen that an image gets created as or converted to JPEG and then gets saved as PNG - which of course is a bad and lossy workflow, but it does happen.
So I don't agree that with PNG there is no way to accidentally make it lossy.
In any case: lossless or lossy is not a property of a format, but of a workflow. For keeping track of provenance information and workflow history, I would recommend looking into JPEG Trust / C2PA, which is a way to embed as metadata what happened to an image since it was captured/generated. Relying on the choice of image format for this is fragile and doesn't allow expressing the nuances, since reality is more complicated than just a binary "lossless or lossy".
> Specifically for JPEG files, the default cjxl behavior is to apply lossless
recompression and the default djxl behavior is to reconstruct the original
JPEG file (when the extension of the output file is .jpg).
You're right, however, that you do need to be careful and use the reference codec package for this, as tools like ImageMagick create loss during the decoding of the JPEG into pixels (https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/discussions/6046) and ImageMagick sets quality to 92 by default. But perhaps that's something we can change.
To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar. It's part of the Windows status bar design, not of the window design. Of course, many more applications used to have status bars than they do now, so that's why you see it less often.
>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:
Yes, but that is skeuomorphic design, which is old and ugly. We live in the era of anti-skeuomorphic design, where nothing makes any sense but it looks sleek.
>desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds
Personally, I believe the REAL problem is the rough edges WITH Linux.
Hardware support? You can blame manufacturers for not supporting Linux. Software support? Same.
But if you use a Linux software made for Linux by Linux users and it just feels inconvenient, non-intuitive, buggy, and mentally painful to use, you're going to think that Linux is full of bad software. Because it doesn't matter if you use X11 or Wayland under the hood, you try to drag and drop an icon from the start menu to the desktop or vice-versa and that only works in some DEs. You try to drag and drop an image from Chrome to the file manager, and that doesn't always work. You try to click the close button and sometimes there is a few pixels of padding at the top so you can't close the window on first try.
This isn't Nvidia's fault, or Adobe's fault, or Microsoft's fault. It's just Linux.
Imagine a very plausible situation. You have 1 HTML file at the top that wants to access hundreds of files in a subfolder. There is no way you can show Allow | Deny for every one of them. On the other hand, it's also possible for someone to take that file and put it in a folder like Documents or Downloads, so blanket allowing it access to siblings would allow access to all those files.
This could easily be solved by some simple contract like "webgame.html can only access files in a webpage/ subdirectory," but the powers that be deemed such thing not worth the trouble.
Everyone says "we only store the data temporarily and it's deleted right after" including everyone who didn't do that and got hacked.
But I think we're far too late into this issue by now.
It's 2026 and we still don't have a way to know if our passwords are being stored in a secure way in their databases. What hope do we have to know about how our photos are being handled?