Ikeas flat pack is actually pretty decent for how well it goes together compared to other budget brands. Sure Ikea has reduced quality over the years, we still have a dinning room table thats made from solid pieces of actual beech rather than the vinyl wrapped cardboard that they sell as table tops now. Dont even get me started on the switch from metal to plastic cam locks.

Their builds are usually one of the simplest for flat pack due to better than average build tolerances, some actual QA (although its not foolproof), and well thought out design. I can usually build Ikea furniture without looking at the instructions because it reuses so many of the same concepts, its the Lego of flatpack.

Some basic extra steps with some wood glue, some clamps if it doesnt sit square while the glue dries, and an appropriately coloured gap sealer really goes a long way for improving the final build quality.

Only thing I don’t like with Photolab is that there is no Linux client. I ended up getting a Mac because I liked the latest version of Photolab so much for my workflow. Deepprime xd3 is just ridiculous at cleaning up my high ISO photos.

Are you using assisted culling in Lightroom for culling? As yeah, thats just missing from Darktable and you would have to use another (opensource) tool to do that.

However if you are still manual, I dont agree once you have learned the keyboard shortcuts, that’s as fast for me in both, or in my current tool of choice, photolab. Even just using 1 to 5 to do basic culling with auto advance is a game changer for manual review.

Editing really depends on your workflow, if you have a lot of similar shots you can just copy and paste a working set across everything thats similar and then manually tweak. Even if the shots aren’t the same just applying the usual set of modules with some sensible defaults across photos is very helpful. I used to keep one back from my last set as a template.