I don’t think we need to go that far and scare people off from asking questions. The reality is that many people picking up Darktable will have come from Lightroom, and I think it’s only natural that they will want to know “equivalents” while getting to grips with the new software. It’s good advice to tell them to start thinking in Darktable terms rather than trying to mimic the Lightroom workflow, but we can also help by providing some equivalency.
These topics can get a bit prickly, especially if someone starts to imply that Adobe has it right and Darktable needs to be better, but I think many also come in good faith and are genuinely a bit confused by the different approach/philosophy of Darktable. The discussions on finding equivalency are also often very enlightening and can help experienced users too. For all its faults, Lightroom has done a very good job at simplifying the RAW development process, and it has become an industry standard whether we like it or not.
I guess the advice is to help them find the “path to the same goal” rather than “the equivalent sliders”.
Additionally, there is a wealth of post processing tutorials available on the internet, which is predominantly written for Lightroom. These tutorials (and books, videos, lectures) typically translate readily to other tools, such as darktable or rawtherapee.
Personally, I enjoyed, for instance, Vision and Voice by David DuChemin, The Photographer’s Eye by Michael Freeman, and Photographing the World by Elia Locardi. All of which show some post processing techniques in Lightroom, with the express intention of being useful to users of any software. (I also tremendously liked the Open Source Photography Course by Riley Brandt, but that resource is now severely outdated, referring to darktable 2.7, if memory serves).
I’ve read that one too. If I remember rightly, he’s a big proponent of using f22 to get as much depth of field possible (where appropriate). It’s an interesting piece of advice considering the standard advice these days is to avoid the effects of diffraction at all costs. He doesn’t care about the slight softness and is more “focused” on the DOF effect you want to create.
Not the most interesting thing about the book maybe, but it’s just something I remember!