There’s Darktable which is a pretty good alternative to Lightroom. When I looked into it a couple years back, a friend with Darktable was able to get the same results as I with Lightroom, with the same amount of effort. But when I tried, well… The effort to re-learn was too big, cheaper to just keep paying Apple. I imagine now they lag on AI features too.

Darktable pretty messed up ux thanks to mismanagement, lack of direction and hobby programmers that often leave the project. (there is even someone trying to fix it with a fork https://https://ansel.photos/).

What's wrong with it?

I applaud both Darktable's and Ansel's efforts, but they both have a looooong way to go with their UI. Spacing, contrast, fonts, it looks like they never received contributions from people with design skills. Blender looks way more polished in comparison.

That's very true. But thats tale old as free software. It doesn't immediately mean they have bad UX but it surely doesn't help.

Lightroom is made by Adobe, not Apple.

Here I would like to also mention RawTherapee, also open-source, together with Darktable (with is more newb friendly) they are great software worth to spread.

Adobe for a loong time (up until CS6) didn't give a fuck about piracy. Everyone with an interest in media when I was in school had a keygen and learned Photoshop, some even started small solo businesses with a pirated version until they had enough money to buy the actual thing.

On top of that, developing for photo, video and audio is hard due to all the maths involved. The amount of brains capable of that wizardry is finite, the amount of brains able to do open source work in that field is even less, and other FOSS projects compete heavily for these brains.

I think the difficulty of media programming is overstated. It’s UX that kills the free alternatives. In the photo space Gimp, dark table, and rawtherapee often have more features than their commercial counterparts. For instance content aware fill was in gimp nearly a year before it appeared in photoshop. However this is often to their detriment of the software. Look at darktable, it’s a mess of visual algorithms and sliders that have names directly taken from the papers they implement and it’s a mess.

> It’s UX that kills the free alternatives.

Yup, that is a massive factor as well. My go-to example is OpenStack. It's incredibly powerful and malleable, but it shows on every corner that it is built by university nerds for university nerds - you either need to have a massive amount of highly educated manpower to deploy it, or you need to have a source of cheap or free labor where you don't have to pay for the onboarding time.