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> I’ll keep this short: I still depend on Lightroom, writing tools (Notion, Evernote prior), a solid default desktop environment, first-party hardware support (

> I’ll keep this short: I still depend on Lightroom, writing tools (Notion, Evernote prior), a solid default desktop environment, first-party hardware support (be it a MacBook or Surface) & battery life, and most of all, my time. I respect those who’ve invested the time into maintaining & automating a full Linux environment they can use daily, but I just don’t have the time for that investment nor am I ready to make the trade-offs required for it. To each their own. Given the circuitous series of hoops the author goes through to get their WSL/Windows environment in something of a working configuration the above passage is kind of laughable. I too depend on Lightroom, but I've had to break that hold and just this week have gone the other way to a full Linux desktop. Windows breaks so often it's not workable for me. And LR classic has been nothing but a buggy, slow, bloated mess for me. Even just little things like opening the app paints the window over all other UI elements and you can't click to bring another app to the front before clicking/focusing into LR. Let alone the slow loading, painfully slow image viewing and stupid stuff like hiding the mouse pointer after creating a new folder. I intend to split RAW development and Digital Asset Management, which is what I should always have done, now that Lightroom is out of the way. RAWtherapee and Darktable to a great job (and I say that as a former pro photographer) for RAW development and easily enough for most pro work I did/do. The options for DAM are varied but even Digikam is pretty excellent for most things. Having just spent a year with Windows (having run Linux previously) Linux is, amazingly, progressing towards 'just working' for me. Especially with Flatpaks/Snaps (though developers need to get a grip of understanding 'filesystem=home' vs 'filesystem=host' and how this effects usability vs sandboxing) as well as appimage. When they become available on Debian natively it'll be kind of awesome to run a stable desktop with latest selection of certain apps you might need. It's true Nvidia support is bad. I did switch from Nvidia to AMD to make the move. Is that unreasonable to expect the user to do? Possibly. But doing that I get a hassle free 4k desktop, excellent stability (so far) and all the apps I need (so far). Being back in a terminal 'proper' again on the desktop is just fantastic. Not having things update on their own with my say is even more fantastic. And the fact it's not eating 12GB of RAM running LR and a browser is the icing on the cake.

inferiorhuman 8y ago
I still use the final version of the perpetually licensed Lightroom, and so far haven't found anything to replace it. Sometimes I use it in a Windows VM on FreeBSD sometimes I use it on a Mac. It largely just works, even with a catalog that I desperately need to pare down. Meanwhile Darktable is a pathological mess. I really want to like it. They even offer a Mac binary on their download page. Unfortunately, it turns out that the only first class platform is Linux. None of the core devs actually use a Mac so bug reports languish and users are told to simply compile DT and fix the bugs themselves. I'm working up to compiling DT, but the instructions are all built around MacPorts which I ran away from years ago. Yes, I'm aware that DT is an open source project maintained by volunteers but sometimes I want higher level packages to just work without a fight. If I want to import metadata from Lightroom I'm expected to export individual sidecar files and hack up a script to do the import (hint: this doesn't scale). The real deal breaker for me was that the latest version available on the DT site simply crashes for me while trying to import photos. But not every photo. I'm not particularly inclined to file a bug report because most Mac issues get put in the circular file. Once I got past that I found the interface to be… interesting. Despite the superficial similarities to Lightroom, DT is wildly different in practice and not all that intuitive to me (e.g. applying presets from the lighttable vs darkroom modules — also seriously those names: darktable, lighttable, darkroom are all far too similar regardless of whether or not they're based on photography terms). It's been a few years since I've tried RawTherapee but obviously that didn't stick either.
- wishinghand 8y ago
  Sometime in early 2019 check out Skylum Luminar. They’re coming out with a Lightroom analogue that’s not subscription based.
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    > Sometime in early 2019 check out Skylum Luminar. They’re coming out with a Lightroom analogue that’s not subscription based. Thanks, I hadn't seen that before. Two things put me off though: 1.) Lightroom really has motivated me to find an open source replacement. I don't think I want to get locked into another proprietary solution. 2.) The landing page for Luminar 3 that I found was so full of marketing hyperbole that I choked. There was a ton of fluff IDGAF about (e.g. export to 500px, "foliage enhancer" filter, Apple photos extensions, soft glow, artificial intelligence filter) and some that just felt like easily misinterpreted stuff (e.g. details enhancer filter, workspaces, polarizing filter). If there's a trial I may check it out, but I'd want to know more about the tech details. Adobe got a few things right that I doubt other proprietary solutions will. Making LR so extensible with Lua is huge (is the core written in Lua?), storing its catalog in a relatively easy to parse SQLite db as well makes it easy enough to interoperate. As much as I kvetch about migrating from LR to DT, I think writing a module to import the LR metadata seems like an ideal first attempt at hacking on DT project.

inferiorhuman 8y ago

I still use the final version of the perpetually licensed Lightroom, and so far haven't found anything to replace it. Sometimes I use it in a Windows VM on FreeBSD sometimes I use it on a Mac. It largely just works, even with a catalog that I desperately need to pare down. Meanwhile Darktable is a pathological mess. I really want to like it. They even offer a Mac binary on their download page. Unfortunately, it turns out that the only first class platform is Linux. None of the core devs actually use a Mac so bug reports languish and users are told to simply compile DT and fix the bugs themselves. I'm working up to compiling DT, but the instructions are all built around MacPorts which I ran away from years ago. Yes, I'm aware that DT is an open source project maintained by volunteers but sometimes I want higher level packages to just work without a fight. If I want to import metadata from Lightroom I'm expected to export individual sidecar files and hack up a script to do the import (hint: this doesn't scale). The real deal breaker for me was that the latest version available on the DT site simply crashes for me while trying to import photos. But not every photo. I'm not particularly inclined to file a bug report because most Mac issues get put in the circular file. Once I got past that I found the interface to be… interesting. Despite the superficial similarities to Lightroom, DT is wildly different in practice and not all that intuitive to me (e.g. applying presets from the lighttable vs darkroom modules — also seriously those names: darktable, lighttable, darkroom are all far too similar regardless of whether or not they're based on photography terms). It's been a few years since I've tried RawTherapee but obviously that didn't stick either.

wishinghand 8y ago
Sometime in early 2019 check out Skylum Luminar. They’re coming out with a Lightroom analogue that’s not subscription based.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  > Sometime in early 2019 check out Skylum Luminar. They’re coming out with a Lightroom analogue that’s not subscription based. Thanks, I hadn't seen that before. Two things put me off though: 1.) Lightroom really has motivated me to find an open source replacement. I don't think I want to get locked into another proprietary solution. 2.) The landing page for Luminar 3 that I found was so full of marketing hyperbole that I choked. There was a ton of fluff IDGAF about (e.g. export to 500px, "foliage enhancer" filter, Apple photos extensions, soft glow, artificial intelligence filter) and some that just felt like easily misinterpreted stuff (e.g. details enhancer filter, workspaces, polarizing filter). If there's a trial I may check it out, but I'd want to know more about the tech details. Adobe got a few things right that I doubt other proprietary solutions will. Making LR so extensible with Lua is huge (is the core written in Lua?), storing its catalog in a relatively easy to parse SQLite db as well makes it easy enough to interoperate. As much as I kvetch about migrating from LR to DT, I think writing a module to import the LR metadata seems like an ideal first attempt at hacking on DT project.