Instant pass.

Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.

>Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common.

What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.

OpenCL is unsupported for M1/2/3/4/5, which makes RAW file processing, batch workflows, basically everything, unusably slow.

Unless something has changed in the past few months, Darktable is dead on MacOS with no fix in sight.

    Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if it didn’t die of feature creep .

    Between 2020 and 2023, Darktable has suffered massive code additions of peripheral features, often ill-coded, poorly designed and penalizing usability, performance and maintenance. Too many workarounds failed to fix bugs, but layered new problems on top of legacy code : welcome in maintenance nightmare.