I’ve been photographing for seven decades. I’ve also been into computers since the 70’s, and once the IBM PC came out, I’ve had my nose in code. At home I switched from Windows for Workgroups to Linux, and I quickly found gimp. A Nikon D70 came as sort of a pre-retirement present in 2004, and soon I began building gimp from source code. Disliking jpegs because of the compression losses and only 8 bits of depth, I found ufraw as a ‘developer’ for Nikon nef files. When that development stopped, I found Darktable.

These days I build both from git master in linux. For windows 11 I use the *.exe files from gimp.org and darktable.org.

When using windows, I find that most things work about as well as they do in linux, but I do find that windows versions of gimp and darktable have bottlenecks. I’d like to see the windows users get the same experience as I get in the native linux.