Any Linux & darktable users here?

I've dabbled with Linux on & off over the years, a few flavors of Ubuntu mostly, I think I tried Mint once before, but there's always been the odd hiccup here & there with hardware that's not been properly supported. And the lack of a mainstream photo raw editor has always been a bit of a gotcha. For me anyway.
Quite a few months back, when Microsoft announced the end of life for Windows 10, I got a bit p!$$ed with the whole Windows $h!t show. I like & use mini PC's, own a couple of fairly well specc'ed for their time models, and my older Intel Skull Canyon failed the Windows 11 update criteria. With the lack of TPM 2. Now it's not some ancient old Pentium computer out of Noah's Ark, it's an i7 quad core 6770HQ CPU, with 16GB of RAM, and about 3TB of SSD HD installed.
That p!$$ed me off a bit, as I hate adding to the landfill with perfectly good and usable electronic devices, just because Microsoft said so.
A bit of reading and investigating later, I downloaded the Linux Mint Cinnamon ISO, burnt it to a USB stick, and booted up the installer. Holy cr@p, everything worked. The Blue teeth. WiFi. SD card reader. Sound. HDMI. External drives. WiFi Printer. My NAS. Everything. That's brilliant. Hit the software manager, installed a few apps, everything just worked.
Yeah, I know I could have just done a bodgey W11 install, but I'm after security. Tight security, as I travel to China a little bit, and access my Interwebz connected NAS quite a bit from there. So I don't want any hassles or issues, I can see the bank trying to weasel their way out of refunding any vanishing funds if they discover you're not using up to date protected hardware and software. I'd rather not find out either way. So Linux it was.
Installed another couple of apps through the Terminal command line, no real drama there either. That was probably the tipping point, as I use Tailscale as a VPN to access all my devices when out and about. And it (the installation) went as smooth as Silk.
Then the big one. A raw photo editor. I'd tried darktable before, and just could not get along with it. Rawtherapee seemed a bit more logical to me, but the lack of masking tools kind of put a damper on that. Installed & played with them both, in the end darktable won out.
One thing I found, is that there's very very very few starter of beginner tutorials dealing with darktable. Hours and hours of stuff where the Tech heads get right down digging around in the weeds explaining all the tiny little intricate workings of the Math behind it all, that's not what I want. And I suspect tonnes and tonnes of average photographers as well.
So the learning curve was steep. Very steep. I'm not after absolute 100% perfection and every last little detail extracted from the raw, I just want to snap a shot, adjust the highlights and shadows a bit, maybe tinker with the White balance a bit, get nice rich colours, and some good contrast without crushing up the blacks.
And I think I'm there. I can now take a shot in some pretty difficult lighting conditions, and without too much drama and effort, and not a lot of time either, produce something I'm happy with.
I only came across this video over the weekend, and by crikey I wish I'd stumbled across it months and months ago. It would have made my life so so much easier, as darktable is such a huge and unstructured program that takes forever to experiment with. I'd given up a couple of times before, this time I stuck at it, and I'm pretty happy I did.
If anyone's interested, here it is. A straightforward, 10 step process to import a raw, and export a jpeg to your own tastes. Well done Mr Tony :)
youtu.be/0RLv8NeJc2Q?si=M-mvsEaNt5xt4SR2

I'm not sure if that's a wise thing to do :) I'm just a tinkerer, with just enough knowledge to be dangerous, and break stuff :) I'm in the metal trades industry, with absolutely zero training or education in regards to computers/IT. Anything goes wrong and it's straight to professor Google to try and work out how to fix it.
One thing that really stood out to me, was just how relaxing the whole Linux computing thing is compared to Windows. There's no continuous pestering to buy this, buy that, upgrade your storage, and so on. You control it. Not the other way around. You can save your data wherever YOU want. Not where Microsoft tries to make you, and then pay for the privilege.
With a little bit of knowledge, you can customise your system to look and work just how you want. Not how Microsoft wants you to.
TBC :)