In mixed news: apparently
Darktable has been forked by one of its lead devs...
In a seering blog post,
Aurélien Pierre elaborates what's in fact a very detailed laundry list of FLOSS development's biggest shortcomings and pitfalls:
I’m apparently the only one thinking it’s unacceptable to deprive the pixel pipeline of a third to a half of the CPU power to paint a stupid interface. However you put it, there is no valid reason for a software left open without touching it to turn the computer into a toaster, especially since we don’t buy Russian gas anymore.
I don’t understand what Darktable computes when we leave it open without touching the computer, because there is nothing to compute. Darktable in lighttable consumes by itself as much as the whole system (Fedora 37 + KDE desktop + password manager and Nextcloud client running in background), and it consumes 10 times as much as the whole system when opened in darkroom.
After 4 years of working on Darktable full-time for 70 % of minimal wage, and 2 years bearing the chronic dissatisfaction of staining my name by contributing to shit, I forked Ansel and will not go back. In 4 years, I brought to this software something that sorely lacked : an unified workflow, based on a set of modules designed to work together, but acting each on a distinct aspect, where Darktable modules were rather a collection of disparate plugins...
BTW, the
Ansel fork is available at the same site.
Your digital darkroom, Ansel is an open-source photo-editing software for digital artists, designed to help you achieve your own interpretation of raw digital photographs.
Ansel nightly builds repo is at
https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/releases/ -- as there are no ZIP packages, I'm assuming it's not natively portable.