Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if it didn’t die of feature creep .

    Between 2020 and 2023, Darktable has suffered massive code additions of peripheral features, often ill-coded, poorly designed and penalizing usability, performance and maintenance. Too many workarounds failed to fix bugs, but layered new problems on top of legacy code : welcome in maintenance nightmare.

They got beef!

I used Ansel for a while, and I agree that Darktable is suffering from feature creep. Ansel right away had some usability improvements. But the amount of regressions introduced was wild. The anger you can read in the messaging was apparently also employed to cut code, and things got flaky. In the end some features I used stopped working in all releases I tried, and I went back to Darktable. Maybe Ansel is stabilizing now, and I should try again.

Look at some of the docs about what changed, reading things like this:

> This is basically admitting that the design is so terrible that it’s verging on unsable without reading the doc. But wait, what are we doing again ? We are copying pictures. We are copying pictures ? So did you pass your picture-copying exam and got your picture-copying degree ? If you didn’t, you should. Watch out, they might turn this into a quizz in a future version and disable the feature if you fail it.

As a software engineer, I understand this, but the tone also deeply bothers me. I want to use tools made by people who enjoy working on it, not by people working on it out of spite and hate for upstream.

Just make a better product. I don't understand the need to constantly shit on darktable.

Looks interesting - does it have better library management than DarkTable?