Yes, it is annoyingly common.
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Just for context, I don’t think @Donatzsky is necessarily confining himself to this thread… over the years for sure there are abundant complaints in the past about why DT doesn’t do things in a standard way like LR or Capture One…
Also with every wave of subscription discontent some influencer throws out a video about Free LR alternatives and then people follow that and are often quite vocal as they were expecting a LR clone that was free…
Often, what we like or dont like can also be chalked up to a personal preference that maybe many others share but also it could be the reverse. So in the end I think its best to look at the UI and if it gets in the way or obstructs getting the designated task completed then it merits evaluation and improvement if possible. Commercial products can chase a market and throw lots of resources at the UI as its the forward face of the “marketing”… in fact they often use the UI as a sort of smoke and mirrors of why their software is better even if the core results are never or only marginally improved.
We need to nurture and rely on those willing to dedicate their time and expertise and hopefully if there are significant improvements that can be achieved in the DT UI we can find someone willing and able to take on the less than sexy task of UI development…
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That “question mark” depends on the user manual. The user manual depends on contributors. If you want to see more useful help in the application, please contribute to the user manual. That requires no code changes, no coding knowledge. You can add documentation for new modules, and/or revise and fix existing documentation. The user manual also has chapters that are not module-specific; improvements are welcome there, too.
Zero risk, actionable, but people have to put their keyboard where their mouth is. (Er, we’re also typing here, not speaking, but ‘put your keyboard where your keyboard is’ sounds silly, and so does ‘put your keyboard where your mouse is’).
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It’s so common every darktable front page, be it github or its website, explicitly says “darktable is not a lightroom replacement.”
Maybe the phrase “because it’s not lightroom” isn’t explicitly said all the time, but I have definitely heard stuff like “darktable is awful”, “the interface is horrendous, I’m going back to Lightroom”, etc. Around every two months on my channel I get comments like “darktable UI is a disaster” and from the context it definitely seems like they’re used to something else and comparing it to something else.
One has to read between the lines sometimes, but I definitely get the feeling that some people want a more Lightroom-style interface, but free – which I don’t think darktable can really be given its more hands-on, manual style, which a lot of people really like.
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Well we’re arguing about words here, but saying the DT UI is awful, and saying they prefer LR is not the same as saying that DT is bad because it does not resemble LR. One might say that DxO PL does not resemble LR, but that wouldn’t be a reason to call it “bad”.
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However you put it, saying that a piece of software that many cherish and use productively is awful is a non-informative, non-constructive, non-articulated, non-actionable, mildly disrespectful feedback that has the only effect of making those who like or make said software dislike the author of the comment.
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Exactly!
And to add:
Lightroom UI’s also leaves things to be desired. And guess what, I needed time to learn how to use it.
Then I switched to Capture One, and guess what, i didn’t like part of UI and needed to learn how to it. And guess what the UI of Capture One leaves things to be desired.
Since 1.5 years I am using darktable. I was a bit confused and disappointed that much of terminology didn’t cary over. And there are things to be desired. But here is the beautiful thing: within this community that can be discussed!
For me the biggest pain points in the ui are:
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The brush mask. When you brush and then later want to add, you see this as a vector. While I understand the reason behind it being a vector, I think it is the most clunky way I ever saw a brush mask. If the brush mask would be removed today, I would not shed a tear. I actually never use it. And I am sorry for the one that developed it. But this is for me the only truly awful part of darktable.
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The mask manager. I often reuse a mask, why on earth is a copy being made of the mask? The list grows fast, while it is al and the same mask… I find this confusing.
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You are doing it too! 
If you ask (generically) people who feel that the UX is bad what they’d like it to be, they often describe Lightroom, without saying it sometimtes, but often say “well just make it like lightroom” which is not really helpful nor actionable.
In fact, many of those people have no idea what they want or how they’d improve it. There is just nowhere to go from there.
The feedback needs to be actionable and specific. Everyone is tired of vague comments about it being “bad.”
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I think those commands are not applicable. In darktable, you usually adjust stuff. Would you have commands like “increase exposure by 0.1 EV”? “Decrease tone equalizer -4EV adjustment by 0.33 EV”? All the commands you list are one-off actions, not adjustments.
We already have a search for modules.
No, but for actions. “Create duplicate”, “compress history”, “flip horizontally”, “activate crop overlay”, “show guides”, etc. Yes, you can assign shortcuts to all of those, but there are only so many convenient keys to press (and one has to remember them). If one does not use an action frequently enough to warrant a dedicated shortcut, an action bar with a good predictive input/smart completion where you type two letters and scroll can be more efficient and ergonomic than scrolling through modules.
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I read my comment and saw that I forgot the word ’me’, so for me, that is the part that I struggle with a lot. So I am sorry for mistyping.
There is a huge difference between saying ‘the UI of darktable is bad’ and ‘for me this part of the UI is bad’, the first is a general absolute statement about the whole application, while what I tried to express that there are some aspects of the UI that I think is bad. That last statement says more about how I experience the UI then and actually verdict over the darktable as a whole.
But again, sorry for mistyping, I have grown to really really like darktable, but there are some parts that I think could be much improved (although in the case of the brush mask I don’t know how to do that technically)
Hello,
Having followed this thread, I would like to share a few thoughts:
- 115 posts in 24 hours to say nothing concrete: It is quite fascinating to see so much energy and so many words spent without any real, practical outcome or consensus being reached.
- Lack of friendliness: For a forum dedicated to exchange and sharing around open-source software, the tone here is unfortunately lacking friendliness and openness to new perspectives.
- Darktable is not a commercial product: We need to remember that darktable is not an industrial or commercial software. It is built by passionate volunteers on their own free time, not a corporation answering to market standards.
- Technical migration and constructive ideas: A major technical transition from GTK3 to GTK4 is currently happening in the background. Instead of endless philosophical debates, I am certain that constructive, realistic, and code-ready (or design-ready) ideas would be highly welcomed by the developers right now.
- Time to close: Honestly, if I were a moderator here, I would close this thread. It has clearly run its course and is no longer productive.
Greetings from the Luberon, 
Christian
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That’s not fair. It’s a discussion, not a jury, consensus is not the objective. And amid all the vague claims of awfulness and what not, a few concrete examples where there is margin for improvement and potentially interesting proposals have been advanced.
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Indeed, I have expressed 3 concrete things in the UI that imho could be improved. For some I don’t know is it technically feasible, but I tried to very concrete and not be vague.
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I quite like using the brush for dodging and burning. Not quite as good as gimp but a very useful tool. I also like mask manager as managing masks in the module itself can get very confusing.
Maybe I should revisit how I use the brush, but I never have been happy it.
Yes, I like the mask manager too. What I don’t like is that when I select an existing mask in a module a copy is made nonetheless. I don’t see why this is the case, and why the mask I want to reuse is copied and not truely reused.
I don’t know anything about landscape photography but I think that this is a shaky analogy. The power of a tool is not an end in itself; making great pictures is. Even without considering the professional who needs to produce photos at pace and efficiently, albeit artistically irrelevant (for whom DR’s power is overkill) there are countless creative people (artists, photographers) who have made and will continue to make great pictures without DT. Whether they rely on sophisticated post processing or not, they will find a way of achieving their results.
In other words, having to learn the craft of creative photography through experience and hard work is necessary, learning DT is not.
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Never said you couldn’t do that. I can make great photos with NX Studio or even out of camera JPEGs. I only implied that if you want to have a highly custom edit of a Raw file, you have to learn how to do it. And if you want to do it in the low-level style of DT, then you need to learn it too. DT is not required for great photography. But one thing that is is a lot of learning and study, regardless of the tools used. DT included.