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Comment by ygra | Hacker News Reader

I guess they have some data when all their other products became subscription-only to see how many people actually walk away. Perhaps it's not many. And I'm not sure how large a business that part actually is.

I got quite annoyed earlier this year that Lightroom 6 couldn't be installed anymore. Have been using it for many years but now it cannot be activated anymore and thus won't work. I'm not happy to pay a subscription for a hobby I only manage to do a few times a year anymore, though. Overall I guess they won't care, as they have a large part of the professional market willing to pay monthly.

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Not many walking away short term I can believe, sadly. But there will be grumbling, and perhaps a greater inclination to try other options, even at the cost of a temporary productivity drop for training etc.

If GIMP and Krita would just offer really smooth user interfaces in addition to capable backends, maybe now could be the time...

My big problem with Krita is just the plugins. Photoshop aggregated plugins to export to a ton of incidental file formats, and the plugins were all platform agnostic. Krita however, there's no way of telling if you can export to a given format such as .exif, .dds, or .dpx, and if there is whether that export plugin is supported by your operating system. I've had an issue before where a plugin only worked with Windows 10 prior to a certain update and didn't work in Linux because there was an issue where the AppImage was trying to load something via WINE outside of the container and failing because AppImages can't load Windows native libraries without some setup. It's just small things like that which prevent less dedicated people from leaving the abusive grasp of Adobe.

I just today moved from windows and lightroom to debian and darktable for photography. To be fair I’ve been using linux for programming for years and have tried darktable for a few days now. There are many challenges but its so worth it for me.

I moved to Ansel after the author's blog post on Dark table's development and project management issues was on here and while it's still v0.0.0 it works fine for the most part and does a number of things better than LR. But it still takes a while to figure out what to fiddle with since many things are (as typical of open source projects) just algorithms implemented from papers with expressive parameters names like k and sigma without much thought towards a product and what the end user wants to use. But changing a workflow you're used to for almost a decade is never fun.

Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography. Or as one of the (former) devs put it, darktable is:

  a Vim editor for image processing, truly usable only from (broken) keyboard
  shortcuts known only by the hardcore geeks that made them

One of the stated goals for his fork (Ansel) is:

  to make the general UI nicer to people who don't have a master's in computer
  science and more efficient to use for people actually interested in photography.

The catch is, of course, Aurélien ripped a bunch of stuff out in Ansel that you may actually want like styles/presets or macos support. If Aurélien can keep up the momentum I think Ansel could be quite promising for photo processing on Linux.

OTOH with the way that the devs condescend to its users darktable looks doomed to be a basket case. Seriously. Try clicking on or scrolling over whitespace and watch as you send random widgets off into a tizzy.

> Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography.

You nailed it.

Every time I tried it as a daily driver I found Linux is great for people that want to screw around with config files and the command line and not just use the computer.

To illustrate this:

In the equivalent of the develop panel, on the left you have a "history" box with a list of operation. For every picture you open its comes pre-populated with entries that sorted in reverse order (operation 0 comes last). Why is that ? That's because it's not a "history of action that the user has done" like in almost every software in existence, but a "history of the operation done to the image". They should really rename this to "operations pipeline" or something similar.

I took me a long time understand this and by the time I get it I already moved on to CaptureOne.

There's an interesting parallel to Blender of 10 years ago, which was absolutely hostile to user onboarding. Could only be operated by memorising lists of keyboard shortcuts, and the forums were just a wall of "git gud"...

Then around Blender 2.8 they finally re-designed the entire UI, and ever since then it's been steadily gaining adoption among 3D artists.

Yeah. But the Blender folks were willing to own up to their interface being not good. The darktable folks? Not so much. If/when that changes then yeah darktable stands a chance at being a reasonable replacement for Lightroom.

The technical issues though. Ugh.

Large organizations can get Lightroom with a perpetual license. For me though, Adobe's and C1's rent seeking and the pathetic state of open source alternatives really sucked the fun out of photography.

With some effort you can get Lightroom running if you've still got an activated installation somewhere. It's not just activation, but apparently a time-limited license on the facial recognition software Adobe used. On MacOS the remaining 32-bit code sprinkled about (beyond just the installer) means it won't run on 64-bit only operating systems.

The map view also tended to break after two years or so due to a Google maps API key lapsing. It was noticeable for a whole that the subscription variant got a lot more love and effort (but maybe that languished similarly).

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