M1 Macs and Darktable

Software darktable
1

I have been using Linux desktops and laptops since 2007 and Darktable since v1.4. Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, OpenSuse, Redhat, Fedora, and a few more distros have all had a home on one of my computers at some point. I love the open source community and ethos.

Recently my Lenovo laptop gave out its last gasp of air and I went searching for a replacement. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon I had worked for 1 year and then began to fail slowly for two more years. My wife, on the other hand, has had a Macbook Air since 2013 without a problem. That led me to purchase an M1 Macbook Air, which is the most sublime computer I have ever owned. Stuff just works. Network printers and scanners are detected and loaded in seconds. External displays work as soon as you plug them in. Color calibration is seamless.

Most of all, this diminutive laptop is faster than the Ryzen 5 5600x computer I had with a AMD 5700xt and only consumes 30 watts compared to 600 watts. Faster. Lower carbon consumption. Lower electricity bills. Easier to use. Much Quieter. Portable. With the only downsides that it is less configurable and proprietary.

I looked for Darktable to run on the Mac. Runs perfectly under Rosetta 2. But not quite as fast as on Linux on the desktop. I tried ON1 and Luminar and didn´t like them. Then I held my nose and tried Lightroom 2022 and all I can say is the UI and tools are FAR easier to use, faster, and more powerful than Darktable. Lightroom works on M1. Darktable still doesn´t have an M1 install. Adobe worked to make Lightroom easier to use. Darktable seems to get more complicated, with more modules, and more long math explanations behind color science.

I will sell my linux box and use the M1 Mac that uses less electricity to do much more with greater style, simplicity, and elegance. I would gladly use Darktable in the future when it has a reliable M1 install and hope that will be prioritized (though I doubt it) soon.

I offer this explanation not to diminish linux or darktable. It´s just my experience.

5 Likes
2

You could be the one creating it.

If not in person you could invest the savings from not supporting Adobe and your local energy provider into someone doing the dt-M1 version. It would probably not be much in terms of real money but it would be a gesture towards the things you seem to want.

just my 2cts. (pun intended)

4

Opensource in general works by everyone scratches their own itch and the contributes the solution back for the greater good. would we love to have a super fast darktable/rawtherapee for M1 Macs?

but it starts with:

  1. how many devs do we have for osx? afaik 1
  2. how many devs do we have with the required hardware? probably 0

many linux users do not have the easy route of just paying Adobe and get lightroom. so we step up and help. That’s why linux support for many opensource programs is better than for other platform until devs for the other platforms step up.

So you could donate money for the one osx dev to get an M1 device so they can start working on it. or work on it yourself.

2 Likes
5

Your Lenovo laptop cannot consume 600W. Check the charger again.

If you really-really want to lower your carbon footprint you don’t buy a new laptop, unless the old one is beyond repair. Specially if it has software issues only.

Buying Adobe and Apple products is not a way to save money, and my bet is your electricity bills are not too different than before. But your software bills are.

The only thing I can agree with you is about user experience. If expensive software is not friendly and easy to use, is harder to sell. Therefore, they put great efforts and money in it.

I totally understand that. I don’t want to sound like a free software zealot, but one does not use OSS because it has no cost: if it costs you time, then is not really free. OSS is more about freedom.

2 Likes
6

You can also join the effort here:

3 Likes
7

I wish I could but my IT dev skills are too weak to do more than get in the way.

8

If you do switch over (temporarily) to some other photo editor, I’d be delighted if you could report back after a few months and tell us how your new home compares to Darktable.

At least I would be interested in this perspective. The internet is full of Lightroomers trying Darktable for five minutes and giving up immediately. Only rarely do we get long-term comparisons. And almost none of those go from open source to proprietary tech instead of the other way around. Yet there is much to learn on both sides, so I’d be very interested in your experiences.

3 Likes
10

Steven, it is delightful to see you found a solution for your workload and are lucky with your choice.

1 Like
11

Hi Steven and thanks for talking about your experience. About the new Mac you’ve bought – I totally get it (the excitement and the experience); I am sure that these new Macs are fantastic, I remember only a few days ago I’ve read a review on the new macbook pro, again lots of praises (“the best computer laptop ever! more powerful than anything else on the market etc etc”).

Incidentally (I’m saying this just for you to know where I come from), I have also been into Macs for years, from the G4 white macbook until a 2014 macbook pro; I still love those computers and have fond memories of them (“fond memories” of… a computer??). About the new ones – only thing that don’t like is the keyboard, I prefer the lenovo/thinkpad keyboards but that’s probably just me, for those who are much more ipad-friendly those keyboards are probably fine; consider that I use mechanical keyboards connected to my home and work laptops.

Anyway, back in 2018 for various reasons I decided to switch to linux and darktable, and I’ve talked about this at length.

Now, I’m sure that if I take a bunch of photos and use a new macbook with the latest Lightroom I will be going “WOW”… I would certainly be mesmerized by how the entire process would seem smooth and fast and efficient…

But I’m even more sure that

  • I don’t ever want to go through again the pain of moving my entire library to a new application (from what I’ve read it wasn’t painful for you but for me it was: I had to move twice my library and edits, first from Aperture to Lightroom, then Lightroom to darktable)
  • I don’t understand, I don’t support, I basically hate the idea of not owning the application but only rent it, so you rely on somebody else to hold all your photos (well, the edits and processing); people don’t think too much about this and this is so weird… probably because they haven’t had the experience I had when Apple decided to shut down Aperture. With darktable (or RT or anything from the open source community) I can instead count on using the application even if development stops.

(These two points above are obv not a direct response to your message, it’s just me ranting again on the same topics…)

Coming back to your experience, I’d love if you just stick around here because there’s frequently discussion about how LR is not too accurate (meaning that perhaps it relies on algorithms that can “fall apart” if pushed too much), so it would be interesting to have you participate in playraws for example where we can check if this indeed true – or if indeed darktable has an edge on LR on results alone.

(I’m pretty sure as you said it already that LR wins hands down for smoothness and ease of usage etc; maybe equally experienced users can process files as quickly in dt as in LR, who knows, but what about the results?).

Thinking of that, I have a couple of playraws where editing was particularly tricky:

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

4 Likes
12

Alessandro,

Last night I had the opportunity to transfer about 130GB of my photos from my Manjaro Desktop computer to the Macbook Air using an external NVME drive. Some interesting experiences doing that. First, the M1 computers have been optimized for Thunderbolt 3 and 4 external drives. USBC 3.1 drives don´t perform as well connected to an M1 Mac compared to my Manjaro Desktop. I lost about 35% of the performance. On a fast NVME drive using USBC 3.1 you don´t see that until you load up several thousand photos. Lightroom compiled for M1 still flies through the files and you can scroll through thousands of photos with the flick of your finger. Darktable via Rosetta is slower, and I hope devs can get a 3.8 version of Darktable for M1 built so I can compare it.

The I did comparative edits between Darktable and Lightroom and the colors, sharpness and output are identical. I could not see a substantial difference. Lightroom is somewhat faster and easier to use, but Darktable holds its own if you know how to use it. Lightroom does a better job with AI assisted masking, though it isn´t always accurate. I need to use an M1 compiled Darktable version to compare them more closely.

Lots to explore on these M1 macs. It is certainly as powerful as the Ryzen 5 5600x Desktop I am coming from, using a fraction of the energy, and dead silent.

I will stick around…

3 Likes
13

I, for one, am absolutely not interested in this happening on a regular basis.

1 Like
14

Today I surprised myself and managed to install Homebrew and compile Darktable.git. The process takes about an hour and Darktable runs well. It seems maybe 10% faster than under Rosetta 2, and lensfun is missing. It also crashes randomly on things like the watermark. I have to test it some more.

1 Like
15

This sounds like a life story, when we are young and we have no money then we DIY our project so we go to Home Depot read a book watch a video and then sweat equity the project. The more projects we do the better we get but its still a lot of time and energy. Then we get older and time is more precious and maybe there is more money so you pay the professional to streamline the job…

Using DT is like that home renno, you have to invest a lot of time to learn, you will get frustrated but you will get better, and you do have full control over the project for better or worse… LR is like having a contractor on staff…it makes the job easier and quicker at times doing much of the work for you but perhaps you have less control of the final result …

:slight_smile:

2 Likes
16

I had Manjaro running on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon as a laptop since 2018 and used it for work and as a travel laptop for photography. The speed, screen quality, and interface were not suitable to do major edits on the road. The thunderbolt port was unstable, so I saw it as a temporary machine to get photos home and continue editing on the PC. The Macbook Air M1 has the speed, screen quality, and UI to be a complete replacement for my Desktop machine. Most importantly, it uses a small fraction of the energy to provide that speed. If you use a Desktop computer with a 750 Watt power supply and an advanced graphics card like the AMD 5700 XT, your computer is using between 300 and 600 watts and if you use it 6-10 hours a day, you will consume between 4 and 5 Kwh a month just on the PC. At current energy prices in Spain that will burn $30-45 a month in energy, not to mention the carbon generated. The Macbook Air M1 uses 30 watts when recharging the battery and it gets fully recharged in 2 hours. I will gladly move from a linux desktop to an Apple laptop to cut electricity use, have more freedom in where I do my computer work, and higher quality hardware with better reliability.

In the open source community, I think we should see platforms like Apple as opportunities to expand FOSS software. We should study commercial software products and steal their best UI ideas the way commercial vendors steal ideas from Linux.

All innovation today is a derivative work.

2 Likes
17

Then you might want to convince Apple to drop the 100$/year fee required to get a signing key, without which it’s hard to get a deployable version of any software on Apple’s machines.

Ideas are not in any way protected, afaik, so hard to speak of “stealing” in this respect (ignoring the pejorative connotations of the word).
Aside from that, that’s what happens already, insofar as the limited manpower in most FOSS projects allows it. Most do not have a staff of engineers and designers to invent new interface elements. Nor do most feel the need to gain users at any price

3 Likes
18

To use (mainly) FOSS and linux at home and on the job was an active decision for my back in 2009. Money did not play a role in this and I do not regret this decision in any way. I am very grateful to the developers of darktable that I can edit my RAW images with such a powerful program.
I understand that it might be sometimes interessting to compare darktable and other free software to comercial programs. But basically, I don’t really care. I can use darktable to do almost everything I want to achieve in my captures. This is a FOSS forum and we should focus on FOSS software. For Adobe and Apple there are really enough sites on the internet.
I do not want to be offensive this is just my personal opinion.

19

FOSS is not an orthodox religion that must be defended against outside ideas.

20

Just to compare apples to apples: a typical desktop computer under normal load doesn’t consume that kind of power by a long shot. To take your examples, the TDP of a Ryzen 5 5600X is 65W, and the TDP of a Radeon RX 5700 XT is 225W. Then, CPU+GPU will consume 290W when running at full speed, which they won’t be for 8h a day. Any modern hardware will idle at a far lower power consumption. I could not find current figures but my quite old Intel+NVidia laptop idles at 10W. So, between 10 and 290W for the desktop (let’s make that 300W to include disks and other electronics).

I could not find clear numbers on the power consumption of the MB Air M1, but most forums points towards the 30W adapter being marginal under high sustained load. So we can use 30W as a rough figure for the TDP.

It seems the answer is clear no? The MB consumes 10 times less power. But, it is really relevant? It will depend on the workload. If you have both computers running at full speed for 8h (good luck with that on a MB Air), it’s 2.4kWh vs. 0.24kWh per day, $18 vs $1.8 per month at the prices you mentioned. If the average use is 10% though (a more sensible number), this goes down to $1.8 vs $0.18 per month, so mostly irrelevant. And that is without even entering into the discussion of the computing capabilities between the two.

Of course, there are a million reasons why you would choose one vs the other (while the portability of the MB is obvious, the raw power of the desktop GPU should destroy the M1 for general number crunching). But power consumption under similar workload, although touted as green and good on the soul, is mostly irrelevant unless you hammer the machine the whole day.

3 Likes
21

I will compare electric bills after a month and let you know.

22

Nor am I claiming it is.

But the “free” in FOSS often also means “no sales price asked”. Which means that any costs involved in developing the software and making it available are at the charge of the developers. And Apple is particularly “aggressive” in this respect.

There is of course also the price of the equipment. If I have to pay 1000€ extra for a machine that has lower power requirements (for comparable performances), the difference in the electricity bill has to be rather large.

And I think someone (@darix, to be precise) already mentioned that none of the developers has access to an Apple with M1 chip. So you can keep on hammering on how good the new Apple hardware is, while there’s no one with the knowledge, time, or hardware to work on the port, such a port won’t happen.
And that has nothing to do with any “religious” principles or prejudices.