I will try it based on your second paragraph.

Are you sure the pipeline works that way? I know what you mean and it would seem like a huge oversight on their part to apply the denoise before the other edits. I would assume that increasing exposure, for example, would ignore the applied denoise rather than apply it overtop? If that wording makes any sense

Regardless I’ve used it to rescue photos I’ve taken on a nexus 4 over a decade ago, making them look like proper photos, and I find the feature so useful that it’s irreplaceable to me

The other feature is the AI content aware fill. In darktable, can you circle a piece of garbage on the ground and effortlessly remove it? Or do you have to do some manual clone stamping etc etc?

In a recent instance, a friend requested an album cover from a 3x2 image that I needed to expand to be 1x1. Can you tell that the left and right edges of this are not real? I don’t think I would have been skilled enough to pull this off without AI tools. https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1356058193_10.jpg

Darktable doesn’t have AI denoise, and also doesn’t have camera profiles for fuji RAF files, just off the top of my head.

Nothing offers the AI tools that adobe does. AI denoise is an irreplaceable feature for me.

No photo editing software even comes close to lightroom. As I said in the OP I’m simply not interested in alternatives.

Will performance still be comparable to native windows install?

I was thinking about using windows as a docker container