this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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In hindsight, I'm so glad I couldn't get them working on linux, because it forced me to get my head around Darktable. I couldn't go back to Lightroom now...
Honestly I feel like that's very common with Linux. If you're willing to deal with the growing pain of switching it ends up working out better in the end, some people just don't want to deal with that or it's their job and they can't afford to deal with that. I'm sympathetic to the latter case, less to the former but that's just my opinion
I was one of the former. Photography isn't my job, but it's really important to me, and photo editing was a show stopper for me for a long time. Even after I moved to Linux full time, I was using remote desktops, VMs and whatever else I could manage to get Adobe stuff working, without having to switch back to Windows. I endured, because I'd finally hit a threshold where that pain was worth putting up with in preference to Windows and its built in ads and spyware.
But when I finally gave up on getting Lightroom working on linux, I figured I had no choice but to learn a linux compatible workflow... It was either that, or go back to windows, and that wasn't happening...
That was exaclty me like three years ago now. I stopped editing photos for like a year because I got so fed up with windows and did the switch cold turkey. No idea why it took me so long to just watch a few workflow videos on darktable but I use it constantly now I feel like I could do better but I'm comfortable
I found darktable pretty user friendly TBH. The thing I've been struggling with is image editing - I can't find something that has a decent workflow. I'm not looking for anything fancy. Paint.net on windows more than met my needs when I was spending more time in windows.
My biggest issue with darktable was the masking. It's so different in darktable, but once I understood it, all the barriers fell away
I import, sort and tag my photos with Digikam, and then open them with darktable for editing.