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 for—so 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.
Let’s see…, 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 –
Graphics / Photo
- darktable
- RawTherapee
- ART
- XnView MP
- GIMP
- G’MIC
- 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, it’s unnecessarily big, but apparently they don’t make small phones any more. Or phones that aren’t terrible spying devices. My work laptop is a cool modern Dell. Regrettably, it just can’t 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 let’s not get started on software. Let’s especially not get started on Windows and it’s terribly intrusive spying and ads and disruptions and general boneheadedness. And let’s 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. It’s 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 isn’t 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. It’s 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 aren’t subtly broken everywhere.
There’s a pattern in my likes, of pairs of software, one free and complex, the other proprietary and a more streamlined. I don’t 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. Can’t comment on its privacy features or lack thereoff, but it’s 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 out… I really need to cull my photos. I am now limited by my motherboard as I only have one sata connection left. Maybe I’ll get a pci-e sata card in the future, but for now with a new 8tb disk I still have enough free storage. It’s also much quieter than my previous case and has great airflow.
- GrapheneOS, It’s refreshing being in control of your own phone again. It also indirectly helped me quit instagram as I didn’t 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, I’d meant to post here and forgot, until Soupy put it in my notifications… 
Anything I do here is on the shoulders of giants, owing to the rich layer of libraries and tools. First, here’s my library list for rawproc:
- libraw,: for whatever else one thinks of it, they’re pretty good at keeping up with camera offerings
- libcms2: OMG, made doing color management “mechanic’s work”, a good thing because I still don’t fully comprehend the theory…
- exiftool and exiv2: Metadata is a messy jungle, and these tools bring it to a nice texture.
- lensfun, again, I can’t 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 Stone’s Well-Behaved Profile Collection: Her sRGB-elle-V2-srgbtrc.icc profile has been my default export profile for years now…
- dcamprof: The “swiss army knife” of camera profiling. I’d 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 making… 
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Photography:
Kphotoalbum to organize and view and “open with Gimp”
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 
I’m trying to think what I’m most grateful for (which is also topical).
TBH, I think darktable itself is around the top of the list!
Within it, at the moment I’m grateful for @hannoschwalm’s new highlight reconstruction - makes it so much easier to edit those odd photos that were hard before.
Thanks everyone!
I’m also very happy with my newish (to me) but oldish Nikon dslr - not new, not the best, rather boring… but now I’m getting used to it, it almost becomes ‘transparent’ - just works and lets me focus on what I’m 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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That’s the one…quite straightforward to use.
Ha, went to clone it, found I’d already done that when I was thrashing about when Ubuntu didn’t 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 meantime… Thanks!
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You don’t 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 basement… 
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/G’MIC
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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99% of my photo editing involves Darktable and GIMP. When I tell my photography students about these great programs that are free they always ask how is this possible. My answer is the programs are built from passion and not profit. Thanks to all the developers of not only DT and GIMP but all the other freeware programs. BTW, I resurrected two older computers by installing Linux Mint so thanks to those developers as well.
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