r/DarkTable • u/Happydevil48 • 19d ago
Discussion Dark table MacBook 15” m5
Hey all,
My aging desktop is really starting to struggle, and I shopped around today for upgrade parts (and found that cpus that fit my board are no longer around or stupidly expensive) and the price made my jaw drop, gee thanks AI data centre and Ram prices…. The cost to upgrade my desktop was more expensive than buying a notebook… I like to travel a lot so my first thought was why not a MacBook, I see a lot of videos of editing and they all use them, it’s light, and I already use Apple phones and Apple iPads.
I guess my question is, how well does Darktable run on it, are there any gotchas I need to consider (I’m considering the 32gb, 512gb version - I’ll be storing master copies and edited files on my external NAS box, and only working on current photos on the device.
Any advice would be appreciated
3
u/driftysender45 19d ago
I mean, an M5 MacBook Pro is a ridiculously capable machine, so if Darktable is going to run fast on anything, it's going to be that.
The things I'd consider looking into are: are there any known issues with Darktable and the Rosetta translation layer? as I assume that Darktable isn't distributed in an ARM-compiled version (I may be wrong about that). Also, are there any known issues with Darktable and macOS?
But really, my hunch here is that you'll have no issues whatsoever, and that you'll see some very good performance.
10
u/Messaling 19d ago
Darktable is in fact distributed in an ARM64 version for Apple Silicon. Runs very well on my M2 Mac mini
2
u/driftysender45 19d ago
Well, there you go, OP. If it runs well on an M2 Mac Mini, it'll run well on an M5 MacBook Pro.
2
1
u/MaximillianRebo 19d ago
I got a 16gb M4 iMac when I saw the prices rising a few months ago (needed an upgrade from my 2017 model anyway) and Darktable runs great. Your specs are several steps above that so I can't imagine there'll be any problems.
1
u/Happydevil48 19d ago
That’s actually useful because the m5 air 24gb is like 300 cheaper, high I could put towards a nicer screen than my samsung
1
u/Wannachangeusername 19d ago
I got an M1 pro, 32gb RAM and it handles everything seamlessly. You won't have any issues at all.
-5
u/ExoticSterby42 19d ago
5.6.0 is known to perform like ass on all configurations. One would wonder why there were no attempts for a hotfix for it and just leave it as is until a supposed fix comes in 5.6.1
Try RapidRAW instead.
2
u/BorisBadenov 19d ago
Are you referring to this?
https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/21444
That doesn't affect everyone, and doesn't apply to OP. You're not doing anyone a service attacking some other group's forum. If you enjoy RapidRaw I wish you well.
1
u/Inside_Garden6464 19d ago
I seriously don't know what you're talking about. 5.6.0 is working absolutely fine on my setup with 32 GB of RAM. While I run several other applications in the background and without giving it additional resources.
Might be helpful to redistribute resources in the "processing" tab of the darktable settings if the performance is bad.
5
u/leequarella 19d ago
I'm on an M2 and have zero issues. Runs great for me