Unfortunately they are far from Lightroom, maybe next year they'll be closer. I really would like to ditch Lightroom but there is no alternative

I tried Darktable and I don't doubt it's a powerful RAW editing software but it feels like to be effective with it you need to care about the software more than you do about photography. With Lightroom/Capture One etc. it's the opposite. Darktable is just too 'out there'

I tried to like Darktable but even after more than a year I couldn’t get the hang of it. It almost killed the hobby for me. Lightroom just works for me.

I suggest that you try https://artraweditor.github.io/ as an alternative.

None of those have reliable selective tool. Unpractical to use professionally.

Darktable 5.6 will have AI masks.

Anyway, I tried them, and found that, after you master the "a few rough brush strokes + adjust feathering and mask opacity until it snaps" and "overzealous brush + parametric mask" techniques taught in any Darktable course, for wildlife photo editing, AI doesn't bring much. And yes, this does require a course to break the "perfect mask is required" mindset.

Yes, Lightroom courses will brainwash you that AI "select subject, select sky, select object" workflow is the only modern way to do selective editing, but this is the Lightroom workflow. For Lightroom, it is a natural workflow, because it is, in Lightroom, the best strategy that can create a mask that aligns well with the object edges - until it doesn't. Other editors (such as ART and Darktable) have other idiomatic workflows for masking, and they work, because they have other tools than Lightroom for snapping the mask or refining it.

Bird feathers spread out on the tips of their wings are one particularly bad example where AI struggles, but non-AI tools don't.

Yet, LR is industrial standard no matter how enthusiastic developers of free software try. I wish that Adobe have proper competition, working on linux. There isn't.

I have a different problem with Lightroom being an industrial standard. If you avoid Lightroom, you cannot find a photography teacher.

You can find a Darktable teacher, and I did. He is a professional photographer, but I disagree with that particular teacher's style in photography - especially the rejection of strong edits even if they do work as creative reinterpretations of the scene.

You can find a photography teacher with good taste in composition, with recognition that both ultra-constrained and creative edits have their place (and I did find such a teacher), but that teacher will inevitably use Lightroom. That teacher recognizes what needs to be edited, recognizes that Darktable has the right to exist, but will explain the needed changes using Lightroom tool names.

It's now your job to translate - and, importantly, translate the visual effect achieved, not the slider name. This requires seeing the intended effect. This requires doing it in Lightroom first and then trying to make Darktable output look the same.

For example, the teacher asked for a high-key edit and told me to raise the whites. In Lightroom, this keeps contrast high near the top of the tonal range, right until it abruptly becomes zero because of clipping. That "high contrast followed by clipping" behavior is exactly what the requested high-key edit needed.

But your teacher will never describe it in those contrast-related terms. Before translating the instruction into Darktable, you first have to discover the visual pattern yourself that the Lightroom slider is producing.

And the correct translation, if you use the "sigmoid" tonemapper, is the "target white" control, which the official documentation marks as "don’t touch". You need to set it to 130% via right-clicking to override the soft limit of 100%. Very non-obvious, not mentioned in the Darktable course that I went through, but the photography teacher then accepted the edit.

In summary, the requirement to learn Lightroom in advance just to understand the photography teacher is the real trap here.

For advanced contrast editing you need curves, not sliders. And masks, ideally in Photoshop.

I think you missed the point. Darktable, effectively, has a parametric curve (implemented by the tone mapper) at the end of its processing chain. And this "curve" will, by default, compress contrast at the bright end in a way undesirable for high-key photos (infinitely smooth rolloff instead of sharp clipping). Adding another curve below that will not help, as the contrast compression factor by the tone mapper is gradually approaching infinity. The fight with this default, which is inappropriate for high-key photos, was the topic of my previous comment.

Curves (in the form of Tone Equalizer and the old display-oriented Curve) do exist in Darktable, as well as parametric, drawn, external, and, since 5.6, AI masks.

Another problem with Darktable is, that it has millions functions, demosaic algorithms, sharpening styles, etc. and a lot of developers that probably like tons possibilities but fail incredibly with default options thus making this software inappropriate for photographers that need few reliable tools to get job done rather than experimenting with sliders and buttons.

You speak in theory that geeks and enthusiastic photographers like talk about. Pro photographers don't care, they need results.

Yes. Darktable courses go as far as saying "ignore all modules and sliders not mentioned in this course" - which of course works until you get an assignment that is best solved with one of the non-reviewed modules or sliders, and in my case it was as simple as "a professionally looking high-key photo".

And here is another problem: very weak default look. This is a problem because the default unedited look is the basis of further editing decisions, and the photographer is lured into thinking that the photo is supposed to look desaturated and with open shadows. I repeatedly got the same critique, "why did you decide to kill the contrast and color saturation that was present in your RAW file?" I didn't kill them. I didn't even know they existed. And now I made a change to my workflow (a preset) to compensate, but this should not have been necessary.

Oh, new model which will use all my credits in one turn! I'll stay with chinese models for now

I have read Discworld series 3 times and I'm thinking to read it all again. I wish there were movies based on Discworld but done right.

I think the three mini-series did a fairly decent job.

Pratchett was involved (and appeared) in all three.

The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic

Hogfather

Going Postal

The Watch was kind of unWatchable for me; which is sad, because I like the actors.

Because Pratchett (any of them) were not involved with it.

There were a couple of cartoon series by Cosgrove-Hall that were _really_ well done. (Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music)

Internally people feel like it's becoming IBM. Too many accountants and thinking only about money. Few things changed when AI race started but its still not enough to bring back old Google

I had the same experience with AWS. They even assigned principal someone to our case and guy sent us old blogposts and did nothing. I took a month to find "hidden" checkbox. On GCP I always escalate to pass indian support as they are super incompetent.

(I'll take the charitable read and assume you meant an implied poorly trained, low cost Indian support as the descriptor)

Google does and always has treated support as a cost center, rather than a feature or profit center.

This worked for them in the early days and for specific products like Search -- design it well enough and you don't need support*.

Unfortunately, this fails for most other products (and especially all enterprise products) because the magnitude of impacts to a single customer (business instead of user) are so much greater.

F.ex. every conversation I was on with a GCP product team had a weird "Oh, you don't know how anyone who pays for GCP uses it, because you get it for free internally?" flavor.

* Leaving aside the "there's an entire SEO industry to 'support' Search" thing

We need global UBI but it's not going to happen.

Not before violence takes the place. People are semi-developed selfish tribal monkeys and it sadly looks like that.

I still have it downloaded somewhere as wanted to watch it again. It was great

Why should I use python when I can just use Go? Like why

Because you can wrap Go binaries in Python wheels, but not yet Python wheels in Go binaries

You can embed a whole dir using //go:embed, also python exe for all architectures, then extract & run it at runtime. Python via WASI is also possible.

Bro, I started doing my balcony self watering project thanks to AI. It is helping me to chose parts which I'll later solder and program. But ofc people use AI for different things.