This question comes up a lot. My answer is roughly the same every time.
Once you go FLOSS, you realize that the software world is much bigger than you have imagined. Choice is a good thing but it is easy to be overwhelmed by it at first. I would try everything and anything. Eventually, you will settle down on a pattern of use. You would then have your answer. 
Raw therapee is powerful, but its user interface stinks on ice compared to Darktable.
Criticism is fine, but please make it constructive.
You misspelled both…
No worries:
– RawTherapee
– darktable
Interesting how different people are. To me the RT interface looks very clear n clean, and DT looks very messy with its jumping location where things are. Always hard to find for me what I am looking for.
But back to the initial question, I had the same one for the DT 2.7 DEV version, and I was pointed to Filebin - and best - it worked perfectly!
both are excellent programs. darktable is more modern, RawTherapee is more mature.
Is there anything specifically barring darktable from having a portable version, or is it more the maintenance overhead than anything else? If the second, one thing that might be feasible is just providing a zip file of the built program (before packaging it as an exe file).
The only thing then would be that setting the location of the library would require using the command prompt. But it could be a step in that direction?
While both DT and RT suffer from UI issues, the UI of RT is really scattered, with a lot of duplicate functionality (or unclear functionality) abounding. It has a lot of great features, but it’s obvious that the UI sort of came together like Frankenstein, rather than as the result of any thoughtful design. DT suffers from this too, but not to the same extreme. Probably because DT borrows a lot from adobe’s offering in that regard.
And yeah, I know some of you are sensitive, but I stick with my opinion that RT is powerful, with a UI that is frankly pretty awful.
This is off-topic; however, if you have any ideas on UI, please start a new topic so that we may discuss them. I agree that both apps can be confusing for new users, often resulting in the many threads that ask very basic questions.
It isn’t about being sensitive. In fact a lot of the developers here have pretty thick skin. It is about not disparaging the work that someone has done in their free time and/or as a hobby, then has been kind enough to share the results of that with you. You have revieved something for free which is otherwise fairly expensive, so the right thing to do when offering a critique is to make it actionable. No actions for improvement can be taken from the phase “stinks on ice.”
What are your hobbies? Would you like some random internet strangers to tell you how bad you are at them? Is that a place you’d like to spend your time? Probably not. And we don’t want that either.
Wow, thin skins here. Simply put, I don’t have an emotional attachment to any piece of software and am comfortable with pointing out the good and bad of anything (especially the stuff I’ve used a lot like DT and RT).
If that bothers, you, then perhaps the internet (where other opinions dwell) shouldn’t be your favored destination.
Let’s stay on topic, which is darktable portable version (win10)
Sure, I’d love to see a portable version of Darktable. Am surprised that one doesn’t exist. Would make it more available for those looking for option to other similar (and perhaps better suited) programs. After so many years of them saying “no windows port”, it’s gratifying how well the eventual windows port turned out.
I believe it was because no one could release one reliably and regularly. Someone might have tried once or twice but failed. Anyway, the past is past.
Maybe @Carmelo_DrRaw could automate it (or already has) for Windows?
Are people specifically looking for 2.6.2 portable? If so, why? 2.7.0 is so stable I gave up on 2.6.2 ages ago.
A portable option (like rt has) would need the option loaded before the darktablerc files and preferably before the cmdline is parsed so that the ‘–configdir’ option can still be used.
Simply using ‘–configdir’ is problematic for launching dt indirectly through other app’s like gimp.
Also, the environmental variables are best set in app as being portable, it should be able to run from anywhere.
This is possible, and probably not too difficult. However, I would only start such a project if it is officially accepted and supported by the DT developers, as I do not want to create some “parallel build” that conflicts with the official ones…
Yeah, that makes sense. It should effectively “take priority”, since other options’ behaviors may depend on whether that flag is toggled.
Why is that? I guess they’re not doing exec, right? Couldn’t a combination of --configdir, --datadir, --library, and --tmpdir do enough (assuming the other variables are set properly by default at installation)?
Alternatively, there must be buffers where the values of those variables are stored. Right now, they’re presumably initialized to their default values. If we pre-populate those based on whether it’s a portable build, then it should “just work”, right? Or am I missing something with respect to places darktable writes?
Hmm…looking at the manpage at least, there don’t seem to be any environment variables? But yes, I agree that any environment variables that need to be used should be set by the program itself.
