Darktable is fine as a hobbyist, but it doesn’t fully replace Lightroom when you get into semi-professional and professional workloads.
I need to give it another try, but my 12TB raw file library is so unwieldy to manage that I haven’t tried importing it all there. Plus the AI generative removal and Denoising is pretty important to a lot of my workflows.
Going to be honest here
Windows is good for general professional use. Linux is absolutely terrible. MacOS is also decent.
Professionals use windows because everyone knows how it functions, it has robust and supported user management and Microsoft provides significant enterprise support to companies using their operating system.
Linux only has some of those features, they’re often half-assed or unsupported, and there’s no central authority for help.
It’s fine for personal machines, but I absolutely disagree that the only thing windows has going for it is popularity.