Comment by qurren
3 hours ago
I've used Darktable for almost a decade quite happily, but recently am moving off of it because they made one MASSIVE blunder with the new shitty color grading and white balancing tool that never gets any of my images right, all the tones are off, and it doesn't have sane defaults that renders things at least "almost correctly" at first go like the previous white balance tool did. It was way better a couple years ago with the vanilla "White Balance" and "Base Curve" tools.
Darktable also cannot correctly color any of my DJI Mini Pro imagery. None. They all have really bad greenish hues. I haven't been able to publish any of my DJI images for 4 years now because Darktable won't fix it, and it's a known issue that they explicitly plan to not fix (https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/13319).
I'm currently starting to love RapidRAW (https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw); the developer is super active and releases new features every couple of weeks. I'm also able to add a few minor nitpick features I want quite easily with AI code tools. I have a good feeling I can get AI to fix the DJI issue on RapidRAW since the code is quite nicely organized.
I now have a business idea: Curated Open-Source App Forks.
Would you pay to have access to a service which tweaked the open-source software you use just enough to make it much more useful to your workflow, and automatically updated it over time? (I'm not just talking about a one-time fork; I'm talking about a subscription to get access to a maintained fork that stays current with upstream, fixes any conflicts, does the rebuild, hosts the build, etc... This justifies a cost) This incompatibility with DJI images that the Darktable devs #wontfix is a perfect example use-case.
Needless to say this would be for professional use, with professional expectations, but if your business depends on having that slightly-tweaked tool, then it may be worth it; just exploring the idea, here
Honest answer from me: Probably not, because vanilla Claude Code already does a great job of maintaining my forks with open-source main, and also handles the packaging and installation beautifully.
There is a huge overlap between (OSS users, people who can code) and an even bigger overlap between (OSS users, people who can use coding AI tools)
The people who can't even use coding AI tools almost universally use closed-source software like Adobe Lightroom that you can't fork easily.
There's quite a difference in my experience between "using coding AI tools" and "using coding AI tools _well_", especially when it comes to editing code.
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Stupid question, if there's an old version that you liked, couldn't you just keep using that version?
It's a pain in the ass to maintain when it has dependencies on older stuff while I upgrade the rest of the system