Most important part here, and what is mostly stopping me from jumping ship is photography. Darktable is probably fantastic software, however there is number of great plugins for Lightroom that I would miss dearly.
Personally the bigger irritation has been printer drivers. I have a Canon Pixma Pro 1 which has no drivers for Linux, forcing me to maintain out of date Windows systems to print with, at which point one can spend a thousand years defibrillating half-baked theories on color management and virtualization, or crushingly accept a partial solution.
Canon: GIVE US LINUX DRIVERS.
Windows 10 worked really smoothly on the other hand. And now that it has a proper shell I am starting to like Windows again...
Most likely, if I would switch to Linux, just use DarkTable and figure things out.
One huge benefit of all of us switching to Linux, would be demand for good solutions for our problems, both as a potential providers of those solutions, as well as market.
Lightroom is amazing piece of software for its purpose, but the vendor lock-in of 9 years of raws stored and edited() with Lightroom means I'll need some LR machine unless I want to create my photo library again. On the other hand I haven't seen other as well streamlined photography workflow + raw application.
Of course I can export the good photos as JPEGs/Tiffs out of LR but then I'll miss the non-destructive history of edits and have to rework metadata etc...
> I've been a super hardcore Lightroom user and lover, but eventually found Darktable and am perfectly happy with it now. Its ergonomics take a little while to get used to though.
I know one pro photographer that use Darktable, not because its free but because it has some fancy algorithms that Lightroom lacks.
I truly like the idea of Darktable, but converting existing photo library to Darktable is big and problematic job and the workflow + UX feels really painful.
Sure there are other apps with great Algorithms for RAW editing like Capture One but that's another workflow/UX killer. Lightroom is actually quite awesome compromise between the quality, workflow and UX.