I guess I am in the minority but I did not have a good time with Darktable. I used it for a few years and then had to hold my nose and transition to Lightroom. On decent hardware (MacBook Pro that was only a few years old) it was dog slow. But the worst part was transitioning from their version 2 to version 3 of the workflow or whatever they called it. None of my old photos would render correctly after that and half of the modules I learned to use to edit my photos were not obsolete.

The documentation for it is dense. It’s like you need to know the inner workings of the software to be able to do things like basic color correction. And even basic masking was just awkward as hell. When I quit it did not have smart object detection either so removing things from the background required editing the photo in external software.

Lightroom isn’t perfect. But it is fast, it is intuitive, and it does not expose modules that the documentation says to never use.

I really wish I could use open source software for this. But I have yet to find a good alternative that lets me do what I want (which is fairly basic, I don’t go crazy with my editing) that doesn’t require me to get a Masters degree in its usage.