That first line is telling. It took him years to find a workflow that met his needs.

It's probably not a popular opion here but there are some things that are worth paying for. When it comes to working with 500+ photos from a shoot you can pry lightroom from my cold dead hands.

Also look at gphoto2 for setting up your camera, on my camera, gphoto2 can do some pretty cool things like set the date and time (much better than doing it on the camera) and even take photos. When I went more professional I switched from Shotwell to using Rapid Photo Downloader and I created some scripts around sxiv (https://github.com/muennich/sxiv) that lets me pick out which shots I want and then I run then through darktable. I haven't gotten color management yet, just not in my (college student) budget.

Darktable, which I've been using for at least three years now, is certainly a reasonable lightroom replacement. Its initially rough edges have been mostly well rounded now, and some of the more hard-line decisions from the developers (like "no file delete functionality at all") have been sensibly slackened.

Some things I think are still missing from open source photography workflow: adequate support Linux from high-end printer manufacturers (eg. I have a Canon Pixma Pro 1 and I basically have to use it through a shitty Windows VM), and better front-ends for lens distortion calculators.

I have the same workflow as he does and recently upgraded it by using the experimental GIMP 2.9 branch. It supports 16 and 32 bit colour channels and better interpolation which enables the use of GIMP as a RAW editor (which I find easier than darktable). If there are tech savvy photographers out there, I recommend taking the extra time to compile GIMP.

If nothing else that was a great pitch for the class at the end. It was actually informative and I felt pretty confident that I could get something out of the course by the time that I got to the end and saw it. A+

Also, gphoto2 is great for interacting with cameras using the command line. I will typically use it to import/backup all the images directly from a camera but it has so many more features. I believe darktable uses it behind the scenes, but it is extremely powerful on its own.

Another good command line program is dcraw, especially for batch developing RAW photos. These two programs probably make up more than half of my photography workflow.

lwn.net has a number of articles covering photography with Open Source software.

Doing a generic search via DuckDuckGo [ https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Alwn.net+photography ] shows a number of articles which may be of interest.

Thanks for this. Looking to uninstall windows and move to Ubuntu on my laptop, this comes in handy

I am actually wondering why does Adobe not invest a little into Linux?

Considering that their current platform providers are moving towards business models where they will want to take large share from every software sale, it would allow Adobe to gain competitive advantage and negotiation power.

Beside they would probably create completely new market for themselves.

The Open Source Community should really join forces together to create an unified-killer app for it.