Or why my next desktop may well be a Linux PC.

Let me start this by saying that I’ve been a Mac user since I was 4 years old. In 1984, my dad brought home a Macintosh. A while later, we upgraded it to be a Mac Plus. This started a trend, and there’s a pretty straight line in my computing history from Mac to Mac. From the Plus we went to an SE/30, then a IIci, then a PowerMac 7100. Once I was in undergrad, I purchased a PowerMac G3. A few years later a PowerMac G4, then a PowerMac G5, then a MacPro, and most recently, a 27″ iMac. As a bonus, I also have a working PowerMac G4 Cube, running, in my home office.

In the time since I purchased my G3, I’ve built or bought 4 Intel machines. The first was quickly turned into a Linux machine, and then turned off, and then given to my dad. The second I barely remember. It started life as a Windows machine. I had intended to play Half Life and other popular PC games on it. I soon discovered that I wasn’t very good at them, and the machine was turned off. I don’t remember what happened to it, but it’s gone. The third intel box was for playing EVE: Online, which I used long enough to get married and realize that I wasn’t going to have time to play EVE anymore. It turned into an OpenSolaris box.

The final Intel box was purchased to be a file server. Nothing fancy, other than the 8 port SATA card and an ancient install of OpenSolaris, but it does it’s job well. I’ve had it running now for 6 years. Considering the workload, it will probably run 6 more unless the motherboard fails. (Incidently, the third Intel machine turned into my backup fileserver, also running OpenSolaris, until both sticks of memory and the powersupply gave out.)

So, for all these years, I’ve been a Mac user. All my work machines, with one exception, have been Macs, and my personal desktop has always been a Mac. But my primary use for my workstation at this point is almost exclusivley photo editing, watching movies, surfing the web, writing code and chatting with folks. Other than the first, all of these I already use open source tools available on any platform. There was a conversation at my office (well, it’s more of an ongoing discussion) about why we use the tools we use. And a number of my colleagues are die-hard open source folks. All of the discussions about platform choice come down to doing the things you need to do with the platform at hand, and for each of us it’s different.

For me it’s photo editing. I wasn’t aware previously of the progress the open source folks have made with RAW conversion, nor the leaps they had come to with apeing the functionality of Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom package. The package in question is Darktable It does non-destructive edits, OpenCL (GPU) assisted image transformations, all running on open source software. There’s a lot of freedom here, if I choose to use it. And better yet, darktable runs on OSX. There are even pre-built binaries. I can turn on debug logging and see the SQL qeuries it’s writing to the sqlite3 database file that references all my images. It even imports XMP sidecar files that Lightroom writes out. This means the bulk of basic editing and ratings that I’ve done in Lightroom come over to Darktable.

What pushed me over the edge was Adobe Creative Cloud. I signed up for a CC account, gave them my money, and promptly got my account details hacked along with 2.9 million of my closest friends. As the hackers have the encrypted account numbers, addresses and security codes of me and my friends, I cancelled the card. Just as Adobe tried to bill it again. So I get a nice, friendly email from them saying that my access to the software will end if they can’t bill me. What happens when they decide to upgrade and I’m no longer a customer? I lose access. What happens if they go out of business? Or raise their rates? There’s a huge number of reasons I’m not interested in being a customer of theirs anymore. And Darktable makes it so much easier.

I’m in the final stages of evaluating Darktable. The recent 1.4rc1 release fixed most of the performance issues I had been seeing. There’s a couple of things in the UI that are somewhat awkward, like having different keyboard commands for previous/next image when in the light table mode vs the darkroom mode. But, it’s fast, it’s easy enough, and it’s free – and best of all, the Darktable folks can’t screw me over like Adobe did.