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The Lightroom 6 perpetual license is only perpetual as long as you can find a computer to run it. I am already screwed by the fact that they don't natively support Olympus ORF files for the E-M1 Mark II and have to go through an annoying conversion process.

I want to like DarkTable, but they don't support photos in multiple collections, so I would have to scrap my entire organization system. DT is a photo editing system, not really an organization one.

I'm not a pro photo guy, but I have used darktable and found it useful. Whether or not it is useful to you is obviously your call. I invested time into learning open source equivalents years ago knowing that software and licenses change to much for the average consumer to find proprietary software financially worthwhile.

Another commercial option is Aftershot Pro. I started using it primarily because it's cross-platform (including Linux), before Darktable was available, and I've never regretted the money I spent on it.

Oh and here is the retraction: https://www.darktable.org/2017...

Except I don't trust this asshat as far as I can throw him.

Darktable is from a linux zealot that would rather cut his left arm off than support windows.

https://www.darktable.org/2011...

Also, it doesn't have support for collections, which makes it useless as a cataloging system.

I'm not a pro photo guy, but I have used darktable and found it useful. Whether or not it is useful to you is obviously your call. I invested time into learning open source equivalents years ago knowing that software and licenses change to much for the average consumer to find proprietary software financially worthwhile.

Adobe itself has said they don't make Photoshop for Linux because the market isn't there. People who run Linux don't, and won't, pay for software. Therefore, they don't make a native Linux version. The same can easily be said of any software company.

Adobe will flip on this just as soon as someone wants a massive crapload of seats for Photoshop for Linux and is willing to pay for them. The same can easily be said of any software company.

Further, which version of Linux? There are what, 20 different flavors, potentially running several different kernels on top of numerous configurations? How is a software company supposed to make software to run under those conditions? Simply saying, "Compile your own" doesn't cut it when your job is to produce photos people want to buy.

It's pretty obvious, I should think. You support Ubuntu and Redhat. That will get you the vast majority of the market because that is the vast majority of the market, plus if it will run on both of those it will probably be relatively easy to get it to run more or less everywhere else as well.

I'm only using that one example because as a W7 user I will eventually have to move on from Windows, most likely to Apple, since they are the sole remaining company for which such software is available. This will do nothing to move the Linux needle off the staggering 2% threshold it is clinging to.

But what percentage of users are expecting the same software library that you are? I think the real sticking point for mass adoption continues to be games, since there are perfectly good apps available to do most of the things you do on other operating systems.

Incidentally, if you really want to know how to manage photos on Linux, I propose that the place to start is darktable. But as you well know, there is nothing which does everything Photoshop does.

Why even use JPEG?? JPEG2000 has been out there for a while, professional photographers and digital cinema use it for a reason..

My DSLR spits out JPGs... it could spit out RAW as well, but then I need to do development of it is say, Canon Digital Photo Professional, which well, spits out JPG.

But if you use Darktable then you can also output JPEG200, PNG, OpenEXR, TIFF, and a few more file formats when developing your RAW photo.

Bet you anything they've a managed workflow system and their solution can't deal with raw files.

It's actually worse than that: they aren't merely saying, "Don't send us raw files" (Note no caps -- "raw" isn't an abbreviation); they're saying "Don't send us anything that was even *processed* from raw files." It's as if the raw processing algorithms in the camera are somehow sacrosanct, but the equivalent algorithms run in Lightroom is suspect.

In fact, I think it would be harder to doctor a RAW format because all image sensors have random imperfections, their own physical "fingerprint" that can be traced back to a specific camera. (These imperfections are fixed in processing. All serious cameras have a built-in imperfection reference map created during manufacture and testing. More serious cameras let you update this manually too) Not to mention doctoring a RAW would require inanimate knowledge of the imaging sensor.

I'm not sure what you're talking about by "imperfection reference map" -- do you mean dust delete data? That isn't built-in; you need to take a reference photo of something white in order to generate that. Some software processors also have hot/dead pixel detection.

Otherwise, there is definitely nothing in serious cameras (I assuming that the Canons and Nikons that the vast majority of photojournalists journalists use are "serious") that has any sort of built-in calibration for random imperfections in the sensor. While I have no doubt that, given enough samples and enough time, you might be able to find a way to "fingerprint" a camera, in most cases, sensor noise (whether photon-shot noise, readout noise, or others) is going to significantly overpower any sort of unique characteristics.

And, with Aperture gone

Ok, its another terrible idea from Apple made with absolutely no regard to their very supportive and loyal user base, but you're exaggerating tremendously.

Let me remind you that, although most users seem to be compulsive in how they click "update" whenever there is one available, its is a really dumb thing to do blindly and unnecessary except for three reasons and only three reasons: 1) you have security concerns and the update patches security holes; 2) the update has bug fixes of bugs you keep bumping into 3) the update has new features that you want. If you update for any other reason, or for no reason, you should have your head examined.

Abandoning development on Aperture does not mean that you can't continue to use it until the end of time. If you're happy with how it works now, rest assured, it will continue to work that way forever.

So bash Apple when you get a chance, but ffs relax. Apple is not going to come into your computer and disable Aperture! Its going to keep working for you if its working for you now. And if you were hoping to use it, and are afraid it will disappear forever, well, again, relax, that is impossible. But if you'd like an alternative that has just as much functionality as Lightroom or Aperture, take a look at Darktable, which is Open Source and is not going anywhere.

Nothing in linux even close to Lightroom.

You're right, Darktable isn't close, it's ahead of Lr

Final Cut Pro and Lightroom work so well in Linux.

By the way, there exists now an open source Lightroom clone called Darktable.

In the Gimp, fixing the white balance is a manual process using curves, but in Lightroom, you just point at a neutral color in the photo and it's all done for you.

Colors, Levels..., Pick gray point. Same sort of thing. The only problem is that it expects this to be the 50% grey point, so you may still have to shift things around a little afterward. I agree that this is something The GIMP could do better (there's scripts that may be of interest there.
Another problem is that most people don't look beyond the 'automatic white balance' option in The GIMP.. which is truly awful and shouldn't even be there.

I won't contest the graduated neutral density filter because you're right - that's more involved in The GIMP. Again, something that could probably be fixed with a simple script or just accepting that it takes a bit more work but ultimately offers more flexibility.

These are two basic photo post-processing tasks that Lightroom is better at, true. Then again, Lightroom is better at that than Photoshop, too. You then go on to talk about the cataloging and batch features (GIMP can do batch, but let's not get into that), which similarly are not generally features of a photo editing tool but rather something like, say, Picasa (I'm sure there's a FLOSS 'equivalent').

Basically, The GIMP is not the tool for the job, and I'm glad you have realized that. Perhaps it can become that tool given a few tweaks, but I'm not sure that's its goal.

What you might be looking for - and I honestly wouldn't know for sure as I have only used darktable in a limited fashion and your use cases may not be at all similar to mine - are tools like DigiKam, DarkTable and RawTherapee.
http://www.darktable.org/
http://www.digikam.org/
http://rawtherapee.com/
There's probably others, these are the ones I'm aware of as they deal with RAW files - which The GIMP can't handle those quite as well as anybody would like.

That said, since you already splurged for Lightroom - or hoisted a flag - you might as well keep using that. It's an excellent piece of software. ( Still, can't hurt to at least try the alternatives. )

I can only surmise from your comment that you must be using a distro like Suse or Fedora, which is the source of your problems. Suse I've used on and off over the years, and never have been happy with them. Just questionable decisions with regard to configuration, setup utilities, and buggy interfaces. Fedora is definitely not a desktop distro. Every time I give it a try, I run into some kind of ridiculous problem (crashy, graphics artifacts, broken packages) within the first couple of weeks. So if you really want a desktop distro, what you need is Ubuntu. It's the only distro, out of hundreds, that is really focused on desktop usability, and that is why people like me stick with it despite things like unity-lens-shopping. There just isn't a good alternative, or at least I haven't found one. With Ubuntu, most of your list goes away:
1) No RTFM on the ubuntuforums. I have never seen it.
2) No dependency hell. Ever. And the PPA respoitories are nice when you are looking for custom packages.
3) No binary blob or proprietary codec war. In older versions of Ubuntu these were opt-in, but now they are installed by default. So everything works pretty well out of the box.
4) For SAMBA, what is it you are trying to do? File sharing is pretty easy to setup in Ubuntu. If you are looking to join a domain, then SADMS is what you are looking for.

As for your other list:
1) What kind of RAW support do you need. Darktable supports pretty much everything.
2) Adobe yes, well, you can say the same thing about MS Office or any other proprietary software. Adobe isn't going to sink the development cost into supporting linux when the market just isn't there. So you'll just have to dual-boot for this if you really need it. Ditto for games.
3) Your embroidery software has a reasonably good chance of working with Wine. I've managed to get a number of simple Windows applications to work this way.
4) iPhone agreed. This is due to Apple suckiness mostly, though. The protocol has to be reverse-engineered to get it to work on linux. It's being worked on, but progress is slow.
5) Bravo SE, seems like they have some kind of linux support, but again, without the market they don't have the pressure to make it work. The upside is they do seem to have an SDK, so an interested linux developer could take it up as a project.
6) Which printer? A number of Brother printers are supported.
7) Silverlight? Don't expect MS to cooperate on this. They could and it would work with minimal effort, but they won't.