This is the one

My understanding of history is that in retrospect a lot of things get boiled down to one significant turning point which was not recognised as such at the time.

It might be that the actions of Luigi Mangione come be seen that way.

So he was smoking hemp?

“Fish and chips por favor.”

Take a look at Rawtherapee - I found it much easier to get into than Darktable. It doesn’t really do management of a library of images but you can use Digikam or Shotwell for that and set Rawtherapee as the external RAW editor. If you want to quickly evaluate and rate image files nothing beats Geeqie though in my experience.

Re GIMP: On large files I’ve noticed significant improvements to performance by setting the image encoding to 32bit linear floating point. Gimp uses this behind the scenes for processing anyway, so it doesn’t have to do any extra conversion while you’re editing. Just be aware that you’ll want to be using a linear icc profile too or your images will be dark, and make sure to convert it appropriately before exporting. If you’re using the built-in sRGB profile GIMP should take care of everything for you though.

Also check in your preferences that you are allowing GIMP enough access to your CPU and memory.

GIMP’s defaults are really good imo, but if you deviate from them in one area you need to know how to set the others in accordance with it to get images looking like you expect. It can be complicated to fully understand it all, but if you experiment with 1) the encoding settings 2) your image’s icc profile and 3) the display profile you should be able to settle on a workflow that works for you. It’s all configurable, you just need to find the right combo 👍

Also bear in mind that the file sizes you see reported in GIMP are their size in RAM, as opposed to their size when exported to disk and include all the extra non-destructive stuff GIMP is using while working on your project. Saved XCF projects will be large for this reason too, but when you export as an image file like .tif or .jpg the file size on disk will be as expected. Personally, I like seeing my RAM getting properly utilised as it’s much faster than my disk…

Put it this way: if you you don’t tell them about your other problems what will happen?

The NHS exists for your health, not for the convenience of receptionists or any other employee, despite how they might try to make you feel otherwise.

This isn’t a moral or political point. If you insist on your health issues being addressed they will see to it. You have rights.

The culture of fobbing people off probably does reduce load on the NHS in the short term because it deters timewasters, but it also deters people with genuine problems who are entitled to treatment.

If it makes you feel better about ‘being a burden’ just remember that you will be more resource-intensive for them to treat the longer your issues are left to worsen.