What tools did you use today, this week or month that you are thankful for? Previous thread for comparison of what people thought a year ago.
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Interesting, I would answer the exact same as last year, but add that everything is now orders of magnitude faster with my new laptop with a decent GPU. 
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What laptop? That would be what you are grateful forāso I am curious.
Well I am a huge fan of Darktable and it just keeps improving with each new release. The new diffuse or sharpen module is great for initial raw sharpening. The new ability to match exposures and colors in Darktable is also a huge leap forward. Thanks AP for your great work.
Letās seeā¦, Where do I start and where do I end? At some point or another I use ( to some degree) all of the following and am thankful for all the devs behind these packages ā
Graphics / Photo
- darktable
- RawTherapee
- ART
- XnView MP
- GIMP
- GāMIC
- Affinity Photo*
- Fast Stone Image Viewer*
- Greenshot
- Inkscape
- QCAD*
Astronomy
- SkyTools 4 SE*
- Cartes du Ciel
- Virtual Moon Atlas
- C2A
- Deep-Sky Planner*
- Stellarium
- Aladin
Network
- Firefox
- Thunderbird
- WinSCP
- PuTTY
Other / General
- LibreOffice
- Joplin
- MusicBee
- PSpad
- ZTreeWin*
- VirtualBox
- 7-Zip
- FreeCommander XE*
- Mp3tag
- SyncBack Free*
- Vim
* Non-FOSS or non-free
And to be fair we should include RMS in this list for his GCC contributions that ultimately underlie much of the above.
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This is a bad time for me to answer this thread. I am at the moment very disgruntled about most of the technology I use. My phone regularly crashed on vacation during GPS navigation (the worst time!). Also, itās unnecessarily big, but apparently they donāt make small phones any more. Or phones that arenāt terrible spying devices. My work laptop is a cool modern Dell. Regrettably, it just canāt deal reliably with USB-C any more, yet does not have any other ports. So every time it boots I have to randomly plug and unplug things until it recognizes all monitors and periphery. My Desktop is not nearly as bad, but it gets stuck in its BIOS during boot half the time, if a certain external hard drive is connected. And letās not get started on software. Letās especially not get started on Windows and itās terribly intrusive spying and ads and disruptions and general boneheadedness. And letās absolutely positively not at all get started on web software, which is just immeasurably broken beyond belief all over the board.
Anyway, this thread is supposed to be positive:
- I like my Surface tablet. Itās the perfect blend of a media consumption device, yet also capable of being a computer if necessary.
- I greatly enjoy my my Steam Deck. Finally a way of playing games and retro games that does not break the bank, and isnāt as restrictive as a console.
- I like Digikam a whole lot. It looks a bit dated and cluttered, but at the end of the day it does its job admirably.
- I am continuously astounded by Emacs. No other software comes close to its malleability.
- I also like Sublime Text, however, which is a fair shot at a modern commercial text editor without being to dumbed down in terms of extensibility.
- I like PTGUI for a very similar reason as Sublime Text.
- I appreciate darktable. Itās a fantastic piece of software and a terrific raw developer most of the time. Perhaps more importantly, darktable and the discussions about it have taught me an enormous amount about image processing!
- I also like Capture One. Depending on mood, I sometimes prefer its streamlined editing experience. And it runs fast enough on the aforementioned Surface.
- I love my Kobo Aura ereader. It just does its job with minimum of fuss and still is a gorgeous device after all these years. Similarly, Calibre does a great job of organizing my ebook library.
- I absolutely adore my cameras. These are for once devices that actually do their job properly almost all of the time. I wonder if part of my enjoyment of photography is merely about handling technological devices that arenāt subtly broken everywhere.
Thereās a pattern in my likes, of pairs of software, one free and complex, the other proprietary and a more streamlined. I donāt quite know what to make of it. Perhaps I should just give in and go one way or the other.
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You might be interested in the Asus Zenphone 9. Canāt comment on its privacy features or lack thereoff, but itās light and small, a bit like the s10e.
Kobos are great.
I am grateful to:
- Darktable and R-Darktable. Both for obvious reasons.
- My new PC case (Phanteks P600S) it finally let me add more storage as I was running outā¦ I really need to cull my photos. I am now limited by my motherboard as I only have one sata connection left. Maybe Iāll get a pci-e sata card in the future, but for now with a new 8tb disk I still have enough free storage. Itās also much quieter than my previous case and has great airflow.
- GrapheneOS, Itās refreshing being in control of your own phone again. It also indirectly helped me quit instagram as I didnāt install it when I moved over and quickly realized I was missing nothing.
- Vim, use it every day and it saves me so much time.
- My two cameras, they are a great incentive to go out of the house and appreciate everything more.
I am grateful for the thread to express gratitude, and by extension the forum hosting it, and all those who contribute to helping us learn and discuss the tools.
Image software I have used recently I am grateful for:
Darktable, krita (plus gmic), imagemagick, geeqie, exiftool, dcamprof and profiles for them from Elle Stone, @ggbutcher
Linux mint for being very stable and making my transition to Linux mostly pain free.
And not image related, but umatrix plugin for Firefox, allowing me to block a large percentage of junk that websites try to run in the background (trackers, scripts, etc).
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Oh gee, Iād meant to post here and forgot, until Soupy put it in my notificationsā¦ 
Anything I do here is on the shoulders of giants, owing to the rich layer of libraries and tools. First, hereās my library list for rawproc:
- libraw,: for whatever else one thinks of it, theyāre pretty good at keeping up with camera offerings
- libcms2: OMG, made doing color management āmechanicās workā, a good thing because I still donāt fully comprehend the theoryā¦
- exiftool and exiv2: Metadata is a messy jungle, and these tools bring it to a nice texture.
- lensfun, again, I canāt make a hobby of keeping up with cameras.
- librtprocess: Access to quality demosaic, highlight reconstruction, and chromatic abberation tools right at the time I needed them.
And then, the two external tools that have made so much of my work possible:
- Elle Stoneās Well-Behaved Profile Collection: Her sRGB-elle-V2-srgbtrc.icc profile has been my default export profile for years nowā¦
- dcamprof: The āswiss army knifeā of camera profiling. Iād still be struggling with the math to make SSF profiles without this tool
And finally, this forum and all its participants. What a rich place to discuss (and cuss) image makingā¦ 
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Photography:
Kphotoalbum to organize and view and āopen with Gimpā
Gimp, Gimp, Gimp
Darktable as Gimp-plugin (almost only to convert from raw)
Lensfun, Gmic as Gimp-plugin
This is a good idea for a thread 
Iām trying to think what Iām most grateful for (which is also topical).
TBH, I think darktable itself is around the top of the list!
Within it, at the moment Iām grateful for @hannoschwalmās new highlight reconstruction - makes it so much easier to edit those odd photos that were hard before.
Thanks everyone!
Iām also very happy with my newish (to me) but oldish Nikon dslr - not new, not the best, rather boringā¦ but now Iām getting used to it, it almost becomes ātransparentā - just works and lets me focus on what Iām capturing.
A few additional projects that make my life easier:
- Rapid Photo Downloader
- Geeqie
- exiftool
- focus-stack
All of them no muss, no fuss. Thanks!
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Are you referring to this focus-stack?
https://github.com/PetteriAimonen/focus-stack
Gonna try itā¦
Thatās the oneā¦quite straightforward to use.
Ha, went to clone it, found Iād already done that when I was thrashing about when Ubuntu didnāt pull Hugin forward in the most recent release. Aborted building it when I found out what a disk pig is OpenCV. Rethinking that, but will try the AppImage in the meantimeā¦ Thanks!
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You donāt necessarily have to build the whole spaceship that is OpenCV but it may take more patience than one may have at a sitting.
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Ha, you must have a hidden camera in my basementā¦ 
I am using Linux and FOSS for many years now. I am grateful to all people developing and supporting FOSS! In some cases I try to help myself.
So great thanks for making
Archlinux
Ubuntu
OpenVPN
apache2
roundcube
OpenMeetings
Postfix/Dovecot
Firefox
Thunderbird
Gimp/GāMIC
darktable
inkscape
R
ImageJ
Nextcloud
LibreOffice
Gnome
and many, many more possible!
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darktable <3
digikam
rapid photo downloader
scribus
gimp
krita
emacs
OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my new tower pc (I switched from an Thinkpad x220. so it made quite a difference)
Nextcloud
LibreOffice
Thunderbird
Firefox
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