Survey is now closed with 1110 entries. Here are a couple of raw screenshots with some quick comments. More in-depth review will come in the next days, since I need to isolate for example the native English speakers from the rest, since the language of the survey was English, I expect that to have biased the answers toward highly educated people in non-English-speaking countries.
Participation stats:
So it was time to close it.
Heat-map of users origin:
So the Republican states of USA don’t use darktable apparently
. What baffles me is users come mostly from rich countries, which is weird since it’s free to use. Does that mean that Third-World countries prefer pirated Adobe products ? One could argue it’s a matter of population density, but India speaks mostly English, weights for like 1/6 of the World’s population, and yet… even Australia has had more respondants.
I don’t like these results one bit. It means that OpenSource is not democratic at all. It’s free and yet only used by the richs.
Education & Computer science level:
So we got 56% of users having studied sciences, 87% have attended university, 58% of them holding at least a master’s degree if not a PhD, almost a third (!) of them can read C code and 46% of them know how to write a computer program.
Remember that 8% of the US population has a master’s degree. In France, socialist system where studies have been “free” for the past 50 years or so, only 18% of people have an university degree of any kind.
That is even worse than what I imagined. It means that what we write on the website “darktable is made by photographers for photographers” is wrong. darktable is used mostly by engineers. I have nothing against engineers (guilty), but darktable is not Vim, it’s supposed to be an art software… that is not used by artists.
I won’t post all the screenshots now, anyway I will need to split results between education level, origin and stuff to make it meaningful, but here are a few figures:
- users describe their photography as personal (24%), artistic (16%), documentary (15%), familial (14%) ,
- 50% of users see photography as a serious hobby, 23% as an on-and-off hobby, 11% as a need/therapy, 7% do it professionaly and the same amount have to deliver pictures under time constraints,
- 42% of users have learned photography on the internet, less than 5% have formal training or internships, 12% took some informal classes, and 14% have learned photography with no external ressource,
- 67% of users spend less that 15 min editing one picture,
- 59% of users wish to spend less than 7 min editing a picture,
- 22% of users use darktable almost everyday,
- 84% of users process less than 50 pictures in one session,
- the most beloved features set is the tonal editing (69% of satisfaction), then the colour editing (69% of satisfaction, but with fewer 5/5 rates).
- the less beloved features set is the file management (43% of satisfaction), then the batch editing features (52%).
There are 2 ways to read those results:
- take these demographics for the average user and focus on making those geeks happy,
- try to understand why we obviously don’t attract art-trained people, image professionals and Third-World countries.
Failing to attract professionals/image experts, we miss people with high skills, an exigent eye and a proper training to challenge us and give us qualified reports about workflow and visual issues. Not that I dislike our current geeky crowd, but a community needs skilled members to drag it up, and we don’t have them. And since that community is self-taught with the cargos of BS you find over the internet, there is a huge need for proper (re-)education too.
EDIT : regarding technics:
- 69% of users use a GPU,
- 97% of users have a computer newer than 2008 or at least SSE4-able,
- 60% of users run darktable on Linux, 32% on Windows, 8% on Mac and 1% on Free BSD.