It was film in the old days, but all digital since early 2000's. I've always preferred open source software which has really come a long way since GIMP and frie

It was film in the old days, but all digital since early 2000's. I've always preferred open source software which has really come a long way since GIMP and friends were in their infancy. My workflow has evolved over the years to suit my uses of photography. Mostly photos are raw material and highly manipulated for artistic purposes. For my purposes jpegs have usually been good enough so I seldom need to do raw processing. For those times I have Darktable and RawTherapee installed, both are incredible programs that have worked well for me. GIMP continues to be a primary tool. It's not perfect but it does many things extremely well. For example, making color separations for CMYK printing is pretty easy and straightforward. GIMP also allows effective image manipulation, particularly when plugins are added: gmic, cyan, resynthesizer, autosave. Workflow also relies on other FOSS programs such as Scribus (for printing positives) and occasionally inkscape, krita, paint.net for certain image effects. Yes, it takes time and effort to work out components of a custom workflow. I have no doubt proprietary programs offer greater levels of convenience (for "standard" workflow) at significant monetary cost. Like everything else tradeoffs are implicit, one approach isn't absolutely "better" than the other.