darktable has supported Fuji raws since 2014! It currently supports the classic "uncompressed" RAFs, as well as the newfangled "lossless" (compressed) RAFs. I do not believe that it supports the "compressed" (lossy) format. So setting "recording type" appropriately on your camera is necessary.
I'm curious where the notion comes from that there is no support for Fujifilm RAF files, as I see this in a cousin comment as well.
> Together with all of American higher education, Cornell is entering a time of significant financial uncertainty. The potential for deep cuts in federal research funding, as well as tax legislation affecting our endowment income, has now been added to existing concerns related to rapid growth and cost escalations. It is imperative that we navigate this challenging financial landscape with a shared understanding and common purpose, to continue to advance our mission, strengthen our academic community, and deepen our impact. [0]
At the moment, this is about a week's work by eight authors. Others cycle/in out, of course -- this is a spot sample. They range from bugfixes to performance improvements to documentation to translation work. All what one would hope for in a software project headed to its bi-annual release next month.
There are many ways to develop, and it may be a bit cruel to compare a one-man show to a long-term international collaboration. But here are the recently merged pull requests from the software which is posted about in the blog post:
Page 1 of Ansel commits is by its mono-author from the last week. Page 2 takes us back to August. Page 3 back to June. I totally understand that good developers need to work carefully and sit on things, then release them in due time.
If we take a moment to page back to page 3, one can note that we're back to two weeks ago (rather than June). Steady work by a committed community matters. The log of work done is may be quite worth looking at, rather than incendiary blog posts.
The post is about how that type of organizational structure creates chaos. In this case less commits is likely better. Quality over quantity and all that.
I have used Darktable because it was really the only game in town for editing raw photos on Linux - and I have to agree that if anything, it needs less features, and more work standardizing and simplifying its UI.
You see this all the time, where basically there is no coherent organization, you just get a huge grab-bag of random features slapped together haphazardly. This is exactly what happened to Gimp and actually started to happen to Blender but then they pulled their shit together and it’s kind of a masterpiece now.
So I definitely support their effort, understand their frustration, and while a little more tact might be in order - it’s usually the people with passion about something that end up bringing it to another level.
Basically blender had a ton of features but you had to learn all sorts of shortcuts and read endless documentation to even become aware of them.
They decided to really focus on the UI and bring it into a more standardized experience, where people who were not intimately familiar with blender would stand a chance - and overall I think everyone has loved it, even those who used it extensively.
One of the things I really like that they added was workspaces, so you can quickly start in a UI that makes sense for what you want to do. Just the other day I wanted to make an animated intro from an svg image, so I just opened it in the 2d animation workspace and was off to the races. Blenders UI has always been infinitely customizable, but without bundling that capability into a feature that benefits the user, it really just lead to confusion.
2.8 was a huge update for them and they’ve sort of been going all in on that user-centric direction with every subsequent release since then.
The blender team has done amazing work on the ui. But it was not some "complete rewrite to make it more accessible" It was closer to "We have a good UI but it has a reputation for being weird and hard. so make the color scheme darker add a drop down menu and most importantly get rid of the undeserved bad reputation by telling everyone we rewrote the whole thing" That is, it was sort of exactly the same thing as this darktable drama, more marketing than actual change. However in blenders case it was for good as people then gave it a try and discovered thet blenders workflow is actually pretty good.
The specific example you gave was the workspaces. That did not sound correct to me so I checked my 2.3 reference manual(the big book they sold right after going opensource) and it has workspaces. I want to say they were one of the big things added for the 2.0 release But I don't really remember that well and am too lazy to actually try and install old releases to find out.
I don't use a lot of 3d software so I am not a huge authority but sometimes it almost is like the opposite has happened. The commercial 3d editors have been copying some of the features blender introduced. stacked windowing system, single window editing, put all the controls up front instead of hiding them behind menus, modal editing. This is a two way stream of ideas as the various editors copy each others good ideas.
Nobody said it was a complete rewrite - in their announcement they call it a redesign, which is what it needed. It's pretty common for tech industry folks to downplay the importance of UI, but these changes were far more significant than a dark theme and a dropdown.
And sorry I misspoke - I was talking about the new template feature where you go File -> New -> 2d Animation - and it puts you in the preset template for doing 2d animation.
The Workspaces are significantly better as well though - it's worth downloading blender 2.7 and the most recent version of blender and comparing, it honestly is night and day comparing the old UI to the current one.
I have a very dim opinion of open-source UI after GIMP and Darktable, so was shocked at how Blender didn't piss me off at all on first use... and looks great.
What we're seeing here is one embittered ex-developer spending time/effort saying toxic things about their former collaborators in a public forum. At the same time the former developer is making a claim to such radical competence that they can somehow keep an open source project of considerable scope together -- one which until now was coded by generally at least half a dozen committed authors at any given time. The darktable project was originated by some quite bright folks. Others have cycled in/out over the years. Generally without too much drama. It's too bad to be giving so much attention to divisive claims.
> So which is more useful, one that doesn't even know there is a new album coming out, or one that knows what was its release date as of just a couple of months ago?
To semi-misquote Lewis Carroll: Which is better, a stopped clock or a clock which loses a minute a day? Carroll posits the former, as it is precisely correct twice a day. The trick, of course, is knowing for sure when those two times per day will be.
The OP is burying the lede! The exciting news [0] is
> We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for
color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users.
This is a long-standing and important effort [1] to make Wayland more plausible for image/video-editing.
The companies I work at are all using either Google Docs or Office 365. The collaboration benefits are pretty immense, and can save people a lot of synchronization and communication effort. Most my colleagues see oldschool desktop document editing software as obsolete and frustrating to work with.
For Office 365 I totally see how it renders LibreOffice like local monolithic obsolete.
On Google Docs though, it's limited enough to hit some roadblock every now and then. Last time it was a gigantic csv that took forever to render as a spreadsheet. Other times it was formatting problems that made the document unusable. It's rare, but happens enough to warrant an alternative local office suite to deal with the exceptions.
Even as casual user who once in a while wanted to open and manipulate csvs in libreoffice I was hitting issues and it even straight died on me couple times. I dropped the attempts to use it after couple days
I think that's an optimistic read of their short and vague statement. Someone has to do the work of packaging it and if they're stepping back (for both RHEL and Fedora), who will do the work?
Yeah. Cloud office tooling has won, at this point. There will always be a handful of (mostly spreadsheet) users who insist on doing things locally, but at this stage that is emphatically a small minority. And of that market, LibreOffice has captured essentially none of it.
If you're collaborating with other people (with some narrow exceptions), the idea of sending around point-in-time snapshots of documents feels horrifying. And, to your point, LibreOffice is from an era when providing a plausible alternative to Microsoft desktop products was a big deal. It really isn't at this point. Mainstream users use cloud-based options and specific power users use Microsoft Office.
And most customer lists are on Salesforce. ADP has everyone's salary data. At the end of the day, the safe thing is to just disconnect all your computers from the internet. But that's not very practical so you decide how much of your company's time and energy you want to devote to reducing potential security exposure while your competitors are just taking advantage of available online services (with some level of security due diligence).
Fortunately you can work on shared cloud documents while still having more features and the faster response of local applications. I often work with local Excel or Powerpoint apps on cloud documents while another colleague is working on the same document. If I need to share the document, I just add someone to the share list. If someone emails me a document to work on I switch it to a cloud document and then share it back to them to try to change their habits of sending out discrete copies of documents.
Exactly. These SaaS solutions are way less (speech) free, with anything you write being a accessible to various powerful entities depending on legal jurisdiction you reside in.
A few years ago, Google Docs restricted access to a family member's documents for 'suspected copyright infringement'. When asked about this, I could not find an infringement, and even if there was one it may have been permitted under the exception to copyright afforded to 'educational establishments' in the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act here in Britain (the relative was a teacher).
Thus, another problem is the SaaS providers ignoring the legal jurisdiction you reside in, and restricting technically rights you have legally!
Furthermore, Libre Office is not the slickest software, nor do they listen to their users. For about a decade people have been asking, Wth do you mean, I can't select multiple images in a doc and move them?! The team's response remains, You're not supposed to do it that way, you must first smush all your images down into one, then import and move that. This prescribes a waterfall model of doc creation; they're admitting Writer discourages experimentation and stifles creativity. Just a rotten UX and a rotten attitude. They should get better or get lost.
I would get mad over this stuff 10 years ago but it feels a bit strange to complain about libreoffice`s broken ux in 2023.
People who claim libreoffice can replace office remind me a bit of people who claim gimp can replace photoshop, or inkscape could replace illustrator. Laughable
That's a false comparison. You can still edit documents using LibreOffice installed via flatpak, or, like probably most users, use Google Docs, Office 365, or OnlyOffice.
Meanwhile without proper HDR support and better color management, Linux desktop is basically a non-starter for any professional creative use-case, including design, animation, illustration, image and video editing.
Ideally both would be done but they seem to have limited resources, so in this scenario I personally fully support their choice as it will enable Linux desktop usage to a whole new user-base (which is also a paying user-base, namely animation studios that use RHEL).
If they have real studios using it I'm guessing this just means plug and play HDR support? As opposed some previously working set up requiring tweaking it yourself?
To my knowledge, there was no working HDR of any kind until the last year, when Valve hacked in hardware-specific HDR into Gamescope, and even that only works if you really get your hands dirty.
Last month there was a hackathon with all the big players (Valve, AMD, Nvidia, KDE, Red Hat, Wayland) to finally settle on a plan for universal compositor HDR implementation.
No, HDR basically doesn't exist on Linux at this stage. I believe there's some (insufficient) scaffolding in the kernel for it, but no support in the common display stacks.
The former has tons of plausible alternatives which are already more frequently used than LibreOffice - and of course you can still use LibreOffice via Flatpak anyways.
The latter is a hard requirement to doing serious media editing work on Linux regardless of what software you want to use. And unlike the former, there's a dedicated customer base that wants it.
There were plenty of plausible alternatives before Sun bought StarOffice and made it Free software. There were plenty of plausible alternatives when the Libre folks "freed" LibreOffice from Oracle.
LibreOffice is still the standard-bearer for open source office suites. It isn't competing with WordPerfect or AmiPro or Lotus 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro like it used to. The proprietary stuff have largely died and lost to the two big gorillas.
It is as important as ever to have the likes of LibreOffice around. There are plenty of plausible alternatives to Redhat itself, but surely everyone understands how important they and their like have been and continue to be.
Only the color sensitive part is exclusively related to image and video editing. It's an interesting question, over the past few years I've only sparsely done document editing in anything but Google Docs (which I still find absolutely terrible). Most of the "documents" I write goes into systems such as Confluence or various wikis, rarely do a produce an actual document in a word processor.
I might be completely wrong, but it seems like word processing is becoming a bit niche, something limited to legal and sales teams.
I tend to prefer Google over other docs tools. Occasionally I hear that people feel it's terrible, but I don't understand why. Would you mind sharing a few things that bug you the most?
Document management is probably the thing that bothers me the most. Once a document is in Google Docs, it's basically impossible to find again, unless you link to it from somewhere else. Documents is some weird hybrid document/webpage/wiki thing. I hate that it doesn't have save button, completely breaks my workflow that it saves everything all the time. Sure I can make a copy, but how to I replace the original document afterward?
Finally, person preference, I don't like browser based apps. I get lost if I have more than two browser windows and five tabs open, why would I want yet another thing running in the browser then?
I generally like Google Docs and find it does a good job of implementing the feature set that most people actually need without a lot of the cruft you find in something like Microsoft Office. And I'm minimally organized enough I can usually find my own documents without much trouble.
I'll sort of agree with a couple of your points though.
Better version control would be appreciated. I had a problem just this past week because I was extensively rewriting someone else's doc and I felt I needed to work on a copy to straightforwardly preserve the original. And this ended up causing confusion.
Searching for the right "shared with me" document out of the hundreds that get shared on a regular basis--many of them routine meeting agendas and that sort of thing--is really hard and I regularly have to try to figure out who the owner is and other characteristics that will let me track it down.
Funny how even the term "word processing" has gone out of common use. Yesterday I was reading Becker's Writing for Social Scientists, 2nd ed. This is a 2007 revision of a book originally published in 1986, and includes at chapter titled "Writing with Computers" which includes much of the chapter "Friction and Word Processors" from the 1986 edition. I recall a moment of bemusement realizing how archaic the term "word processor" sounded to my ear.
>Funny how even the term "word processing" has gone out of common use.
You're probably right. I'd probably just say I'll write something up or I'll share a Google Doc or something along those lines. And we'd just create "some slides" or "a slide deck" and no one would imagine for a second we were going to create actual 35mm slides. We still use "spreadsheet" though.
I just don't understand this kind of comment. I've used Google docs for many years with dozens of collaborators. Could it be better? Sure. But "absolutely terrible"? That sort of comment makes it hard to take any other part of the comment seriously.
Image and video editing. The vast majority of VFX shops run on RHEL/ Alma. I expect the microscopic fraction of users who use desktop Linux, then the even more microscopic fraction of users who use Linux for Libre Office is just not worth supporting over other more important things.
Besides, I think you can just install Libre Office using Flatpak.
Of course one could argue that the hardcore Linux (er, GNU/Linux) document creator will use Emacs with AUCTeX (or canny uses of org-mode), with rendering via XeTeX/LaTeX/LuaTeX... Or markdown piped through pandoc, for those who want to take it easy.
LibreOffice, it's a slippery slope... Next thing we'll be using the mouse and ditching the tiled window manager.
Wayland/HDR etc is much more important for those who need it than using LibreOffice (which still will be available) when there are plenty of online solutions that work fine
How does this make one drop LibreOffice as a package?
If I focus on video editing, do I drop... say, Thunderbird, because of "adjusting my engineering priorities"? What are users of my distribution supposed to use, by default? This sounds weird, if not disingenuous.
Steve Roberts had a gig (maybe during the Winnebiko period) writing a column about his travels for CompuServe Magazine. In case you don't remember it, CompuServe was a walled-garden pre-AOL dialup internet site which included forums, games, and news. In this early-in-the-virtual era, subscribers to CompuServe also received each month, via snail mail, a glossy real-world periodical.
I sent Steve a fan email, and to my wonder, received a reply back. He struck me as a lovely guy, happy to correspond about the music and his general state of mind.
My memory is that an attraction of his column was that each was written from a different place, and described the adventures getting there, and being there. But then he got to the Florida Keys. And hung out at the Florida Keys for another column. And then hung out there for another column or so -- it was a pretty great place. And eventually, CompuServe dropped the column.
So nice to read the article on Steve Roberts, and fill out a bit these memories. Perhaps somewhere out there, someone has also written a memoir about CompuServe in its pre-Internet 1980s glory?
> I think the general trend is that actual useful applications are emerging from enormous models trained and owned by billion dollar companies only.
One way to think about it: Today's LLMs require incredible outlays of capital and processor power (and crews of folks with doctorates), such as billion dollar companies can provide. But how is that different from what Intel brought to commodity CPUs in the '90s/'00s, or what Nvidia brought to GPUs in the '00s/'10s? Or even what Cisco and folks brought to networks?
Though we may never design an artisanal CPU/GPU/router, we get to work with them every day to make things, and to communicate. These LLMs can be that for us at this moment. Let's go out and enjoy them, and see what we can make within their (vast) domain-specific capabilities.
> But how is that different from what Intel brought to commodity CPUs in the '90s/'00s, or what Nvidia brought to GPUs in the '00s/'10s? Or even what Cisco and folks brought to networks?
Yes, they made these technologies accessible and useful. And very few people needed to understand high-K dialetrics or out-of-order execution to use them, hence I think the FOMO is misplaced
Also worth checking out Alvy Ray Smith's 2021 book, "A Biography of the Pixel". It is (from what I've read so far), much more in the history/theory of technology field, examining the math/technology behind resolving continuous to the discrete (waves to pixels, vectors to rasters, etc.), and the associated cultural/business/entertainment shifts.
Not to be petty, but I see that to all appearances Smith is not, having given "Catmull, Edwin" about half a page of index entries. (The cover identifies Smith as "Cofounder of Pixar. And that there are index entries for "Pixar, origin and cofounding of, cofounded by Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith" as well as for "Pixar, origin and cofounding of, not cofounded by Steve Jobs".)
Interesting. Also looked at Sith's site from OP url, and he has copies of the incorporation papers. This is under the corrective history. I'm guessing there are slights on both sides. And thanks for the book recommendation, I just ordered it.
darktable has supported Fuji raws since 2014! It currently supports the classic "uncompressed" RAFs, as well as the newfangled "lossless" (compressed) RAFs. I do not believe that it supports the "compressed" (lossy) format. So setting "recording type" appropriately on your camera is necessary.
I'm curious where the notion comes from that there is no support for Fujifilm RAF files, as I see this in a cousin comment as well.