I really like Darktable, and it's my go to photo editor, but the user interface really isn't intuitive on first look compared to something like Lightroom. The design choice that editing modules should be ordered by their place in the pixel pipeline is logical and sometimes useful, but it ends up with a lot of the controls being in rather weird places. The customisable quick controls palette would help, if it weren't that simple things like cropping can't be added to it (at least, last time I investigated this - perhaps it's changed now?)