Where is the donate button? I don´t see one on the darktable.org website. I will bet that many darktable users would not blink to provide $10 to $20 a year in subscription to fund DT development needs. Who is doing a Christmas Release drive to attract funding?
That is not charging for Darktable per se. It would be a voluntary contribution to support software development.
As has been mentioned a few times in other threads there is only one developer (@anon41087856) who takes donations (via his Liberapay page) and I’m sure he’s not interested in working on a Mac port.
The other developers are all volunteers (most of whom don’t use Mac) and managing donations and deciding who to allocate them to is probably not worth the effort. Plus there are tax implications to taking payment for work for some people. So really if you want to financially encourage such development the only option is probably to find a Mac developer and buy them a laptop (or other inducement)!
I’ve been putting up AP’s donation page on social media for a while now, and we seem to have peaked at 200 people giving about 1 euro a week for donations. I am greatful to those who give and realize not everyone can donate, but the number feels low to me. And a decent amount of promotion hasn’t really changed that number.
Can you take that on? Its a good idea.
We don’t have or want a product manager and there is no product. We don’t sell anything and that is the best part of darktable. We have plenty of new ideas and we are one of the few raw editors that still comes out with meaningful improvements release after release. Seriously. Go look at the release notes of Lightroom and C1. There are some real duds in there.
People are trying to tell you the way things are and be realistic. The truth is that apple is actively hostile to GPL software. You can’t put it in their store, they charge a yearly subscription to sign binaries, they abandon standards they helped found to work on their proprietary thing. Sure the hardware is nice and finally they don’t have to lie about their performance (ahem PPC macs marketing).
So I’m sorry you feel tread upon, but this is not a new avenue for many of us.
Thank you for the great reply. I don’t accept the way things are and think there are always solutions that can be achieved through dialog.
I question whether that is really the case. The M1 is extremely impressive, and has some really impressive hardware acceleration, but I question whether or not it’s actually that much faster on average than x86 with a decent GPU. Part of that may be due to Apple pushing the limits of truth with their performance marketing so many times in the past though (like putting an AltiVec-optimized Photoshop against a Photoshop version without MMX support).
It is definitely more power efficient.
I simply don’t understand this at all 
There is not all all any hostility in anyone of darktable’s developers and contributers against mac or anything. But - i can speak only personally for me here - i have spent a lot of work on darktables features and bug fixing because a) i like to do so b) because i like to make dt even better than it is now and c) i might be interested in some special feature/option. I make my living from something else (intensive care medicine) and would not even be depending on someone buying me a new mac. The question for is, do i want such a new machine? Personally not atm, if there is perfect linux support in a while - yes.
So i can’t think of any - even excellent - argument in a dialog that would convince me into doing a lot of work. There is no need for a PR manager also, there have been many discussions in dt github issues leading to someone getting interested in something. Thats how it works imho.
Last, dt is basically a linux project, almost all people contributing use “linux only”. There is already a major problem in missing osx/windows developer resources …
I ran GeekBench on both my Basic M1 (8GB RAM and 256GB SSD( and my x570 Ryzen 5600x 5700XT desktop with 16G RAM and 2 TB PCIE4 and 3 NVME drives. In both single core and multi-core speeds, the M1 was faster.
It cost less than half what I paid to build the Desktop, runs on 1/10 the electricity consumption, is dead quiet, cool, and portable.
I have been an intel/amd open source advocate for close to 15 years. But I am also a climate change advocate, and the opportunity to do the same workload with less energy and carbon cost is important to me.
Jens-Hanno,
Someone seems to already be doing some PR work because new releases get mentioned in many online photography sites.
I was advocating for Product Management, which sometimes includes PR work but goes much further.
Maybe there are 5 or more Mac M1 Darktable users would could be asked to contribute $20 at Christmas to enable DT devs to buy this digital signature thing from Apple so that devs could compile an Apple Silicon version of DT. If there was such an opportunity I would contribute and market it to my network.
So this is a performance issue or a climate change issue? I’m very confused.
Again, we don’t have a Product Manager because there is no product. We don’t sell anything, we don’t have a product. We don’t think of dt as a product. Nobody would listen to a Product Manager.
The $100/year doesn’t compare to the cost of hardware, which nobody seems to have.
The core developers are the product managers of darktable just because they do the job.
A foss project doesn’t need product managers who formulate the needs of disengaged people from the sidelines.
then grab you keyboard and start contributing code - that’s how solutions can be achieved in a software project with voluntary developers … darktable is no consumer project, it’s focussed on contributors demands
You continue to misunderstand how FOSS works and the motivations of the people involved in it. I contribute to darktable and I do so in order to improve an application that I like to use. I will contribute to areas that I enjoy (for example I’m one of those strange people that likes writing documentation) and to things that help me get more out of the application (mostly bug fixes at the moment). If other people find my contributions useful then I get pleasure from helping them as well.
I’m not interested in developing features that I will not use. For example I will never own a Mac and I have no interest in developing for one. But if someone else wants to make it work better for Mac users (also likely for their own personal reasons) then all power to them. You cannot contribute enough money to the project to make someone do a specific job for you, if they do not already want to do it. Developers are expensive, as you will already know given your experience.
I do this because I want to and if money gets involved it will start to feel like a “job”. Most of us have a job and FOSS is what we do in our spare time. I certainly don’t want to feel any sort of obligation to do it, such as the obligation that comes with being paid. Similarly, when I’m not being paid, I don’t take well to being “managed”, except for the general management that comes with repository maintenance (when people decide whether my contributions are wanted and of good enough quality).
When @paperdigits says this is not a “product” he means this not a “thing that we sell (or desire to sell) for money” and I agree – I’ve tried to use the term “application” to better distinguish between the two.
I don’t care how many users darktable has and I don’t have any desire to outmanoeuvre any “big players” – honestly their existence or not is of no concern to me (at least when it comes to my own motivations for contributing – I reserve the right to use them to make a point about how great FOSS is).
First data coming in from Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake architecture suggests that it’s quite similar. I will stick to Intel, so much more hardware choices. And when it comes to darktable, it seems that Mac is less supported.
I had high hopes for the M1 performance given the large memory bandwidth but my friend who has gotten Filmulator to compile on his work M1 mac found it slower than my older 8-core Ryzen 2700X (which has less memory bandwidth), though of course at much lower power.
You need to measure that, this is a huge over estimate. Get a Kill-A-Watt power meter (or similar) and measure at the wall.
My 2950X Threaderipper and Vega 56 (plus associated HDDs, etc) consume about 400 Watts when at full sustained load. For more general desktop tasks including idling (and including darktable) it’s usually bouncing between ~90W-150W. I only see the 400-500W figure when rendering a video for example. I’m sure your system is more efficient than my now outdated second generation Threadripper.
I also have a fileserver NAS that’s Debain machine with 6 hard drives and an 5th Gen 65W TDP Core i5. I’ve measured it at 50W most of the time with spikes up to 80W during heavy CPU/drive activity.
Granted, yes Apple’s M1 is more efficient than all of these but it’s going to be more like a 2x - 4x difference most of the time, not a 10x.
darktable is what I’d call a very spikey load. It tends to ramp up the CPU/GPU, get its work done and then the CPU goes back to idle in a matter seconds to fractions of a second. It’s not like Kdenlive or Resolve where it just locks the CPU at 100%.
Two years ago, I moved from New York to Valencia Spain. Sold both my cars in NY before we moved, and am always trying to reduce my carbon footprint. Using a 30 watt computer that is just as fast as my 200-750 Watt Desktop is another step in the right direction for me.
We could all put ““for me”” on the end of most of our posts…its a good discussion. With the shortage of GPU and the cost of something like a mac mini I think a lot of people have been considering such a purchase. I have seen this on a few other forums for other applications…whether is makes sense to make such a switch wrt using DT as your main processing app and this being your main computer I guess that has some unknowns at this point as far as DT is concerned.
I suspect its a great opportunity if someone has the time, skill , interest, and a M1 mac to see what they could do with it…lots of if’s there…
My 87 year old Dad was running a big desktop with Ubuntu on it until I moved to Spain. We persuaded him to replace it with a mac mini so that local family could support him. He grumbled and cursed about the change and called a few times to complain about icons that went missing. But now he has this little silver box on his desk that is 10x faster than his old Desktop. It is often unseen beneath papers and unheard above the din of his keyboard. And he almost never needs any support because the thing just works… while it uses fewer watts.
I use my M1 with Firefox, LibreOffice, and a host of open source tools. But I also appreciate the sophistication and integration of the Apple Mac OS Monterey. Both Apple and Open Source work together pretty well so far “for me”.
Vivre la difference!
For many, Apple is the pinnacle of innovation and technology. But in my case I give thanks every day to have a community of developers who create applications like darktable, which can run on computers that do not have anywhere near the technological development that has an elitist company like Apple, the concept of thinking about people who do not have access to advanced technologies, is for me one of the great merits that have these communities of free software development.
I, like many, live in a country where there is no access to these technologies, and it is a luxury to have Mac, for example a 13-inch Macbook Pro of 2015 costs 1600 USD in the devalued currency of Cuba (128000.00 CUP).
Although in Cuba there is a lot of pirated software, in fact they call it: “The paradise of piracy”, in my case I love free software, since 2000 I use linux and I do not want to know another operating system like Windows or Mac, or paid applications or cracks to run them.
I don’t think there are many people living in similar conditions in other countries who can afford to buy an M1, or at least in these early days. Therefore, I assume that there will not be so many developers who will devote time and effort to create a version of darktable compatible with the Mac M1 even though the premise of low power consumption is tempting for many.
darktable is already compatible with M1, since somebody spent a lot of time to work on the toolchain for this: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/7564
But since thats just the linux originated bunch of libraries it doesn’t make use of m1 specific stuff. darktable is not just one application, there are more then 100 libraries it depends on that need to be ported instead of just enhanced to let these run on a M1 based system.
So a port darktable to a native m1 app is a project that needs a whole bunch of work to be done - not by linux developers but by macos experienced developers. The current headcount of these is: 0
So demanding or suggesting doesn’t help until there’s someone who starts doing the job to fulfill his own demands 
In my limited experience of just a few days using Darktable x86 on M1 it does work pretty well. It feels fast and speed seems only limited by the need to use external disks at higher latency than the internal nvme. The one consequence of using Rosetta 2 emulation is that Darktable x86 uses 4.5GB of RAM which is a lot on an 8GB laptop. I looked at the thread you referenced and there is a lot I don’t understand about the process for compiling Darktable on M1 but I will look into to this and try to learn what I don’t know to be as helpful as possible. My first question - is there a difference between compiling DT on M1 and compiling DT on Homebrew or MacPorts. Are the latter forms of emulation that add a lot of extra code or are they THE ways you compile DT to work on M1?