Still, there’s a lot to be said for taking the high road. If the attitude of the upstream devs is so toxic to drive you to create a fork, then why not differentiate yourself by creating a toxicity-free community to the best of your abilities?

You might even adopt forum rules similar to HN’s but with a focus on improving access to open source photographers’ tools (which is what this software is supposed to be in the first place).

Darktable has so thoroughly sucked the fun out of digital photography for me that I can hardly blame Aurélien for being salty. I just don't care that much that his frustration boiled over because he's at also doing something constructive.

Seconding chongli, you can be very frustrated with the devs and not be toxic; losing patience, even if justified, does not justify being an asshole, and even genius devs like Linus have grown to understand this. I agree with some points Aurélien makes and do find Darktable to be a bit frustrating to use, and I'm sure he's right about a lot of the reasons it's slow and not great to develop on, but he crosses a line, going from criticizing to belittling others and propping himself up at the same time, and just sounds like an insolent and narcissistic person, which makes me basically never want to try his fork.

Worth noting Aurélien was a Darktable dev, so he's not some outsider that's coming in like a wrecking ball. I think it's much to Linus' benefit that he's mellowed out over time. However I'm not going to be quick to condemn someone who's already contributed significantly to DT.

You're quite a bit less motivated than I am to try Ansel I suppose. I found DT (and the devs' defense of their decisions) intolerable. To the extent that I got Ansel built on my mac. Aurélien indeed fixed some of my biggest complaints with DT, but unfortunately he ripped out some bits I actually wanted to use.

At this point I suppose Ansel can go one of two ways: DragonFlyBSD or LibreSSL.