Darktable slow on MacOS?

I’m coming from Lightroom, but I’ve always been a light user, only editing some nice photos from time to time. But with the slow switch towards subscription based pricing I just can’t justify the price tag for me.

I’ve got a 2012 15" maxed out MacBook and a DesktopPC (Xeon 1230@3,6GHZ with a GTX1060). On the MacBook Darktable is just as slow as Lightroom, but sometimes very slowly responding.

On my desktop I’m triple booting MacOS, Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04. I have a new 32" 4K Display attached.

I downloaded the official DMG from darktable.org and on MacOS it’s really looking ugly, the fonts are way too big, and the UI is very slow. Channing the Basecurve for example takes a couple of seconds every time I change one cp. I managed to get OpenCL working, but that hasn’t improved the situation.

On Ubuntu, using the same 4K display, everything is fine. Darktable feels so much better than Lightroom here, great UI, fast and everything just amazes me :). It’s okay for me to boot into Ubuntu for Photo Editing, but have I missed something on MacOS? Anything to speed up the UI? Or make the fonts look better?

Edit:

Just after posting this under suggested topics I found the solution for the big fonts.

In ~/.config/darktable/darktablerc I set

screen_dpi_overwrite=120
bauhaus/scale=1.0
1 Like

HI!

I have little bit older MacBook Pro (16 Gb ram + SSD) and LR CC is very fast compared to DT 2.6.2. I hate LR CC, but after playing 15 minutes with DT it feels too sluggish to be usable.

I unfortunately have the same impression. On my desktop pc I am now using windows 10 and darktable and it is really fast, at least as fast as the older Lightroom Versions I had been using.
I think it maybe a problem with GTk. The whole gui is sluggish as hell, scrolling, changing basic sliders etc. I tried it on high Sierra and Mojave.

I’m interested if it is something on my side or a general problem. I have the impression a lot of people use darktable on macOS.

@sotsoguk
I don’t seem to experience these gui issues with darktable on Mojave. You might want to try the Git version there should be a thread with a build on here somewhere. I have a 4k iMack i5 and 8GB of ram with a 4gb 560x inside. But I will say processing wise darktable is very slightly slower then Lightroom CC. On Mac every darktable action gets a tiny delay till processed indicated by the little working wheel. In Lightroom the only time I have to wait is sharpening and de noising. I paid for a year of Lightroom CC personally mainly because I have not yet found an organization solution for my photos yet on Mac. Getting to the point where I might write my own…

On older macs opencl might not be supported. If OpenCl is supported, then maybe it needs several attempts to build the kernels on start ( i had up to 40 attempts with current master)
You can use the script from current OSX Build - #9 by MStraeten to let the machine doing the annoying starts.

It does not depend on Opencl. Whether opencl is Activated and working or not does not matter. Everything is sluggish, every slider just lags