Darktable 5.6.2 ships as a bug-fix update, and Linux users get the details that matter most
Darktable 5.6.2 landed today, and it's the kind of release a ".2" is supposed to be: fixes, not features. Maintainer Pascal Obry published it on the project's news site and pushed it to GitHub, closing out the 5.6 stable series with a stack of crash corrections and platform tweaks.
Most fixes in the new release target Windows and macOS, but Darktable is fundamentally a Linux application. Built in C and GTK, it's the raw developer that Linux photographers actually have, with nothing commercial filling the gap quite the same way. So let's set the Windows console spam aside and focus on what 5.6.2 changes for people running it at home on their distros.
The honest takeaway? There's nothing brand new to get excited about here. Every feature-rich category in the notes, "Big Ones," UI/UX, performance, the Lua API, is marked N/A. This is a maintenance pass. And for Linux users, it turns out that's more than enough.
Downloads and building from source, sorted out
Let's start with how you actually get it, because 5.6.2 tweaks both paths. The Linux build ships the project's own .tar.xz alongside fresh AppImages for x86_64 and aarch64, plus SHA-256 checksums so you can verify integrity before opening anything. Keep in mind the team's standing warning here: don't grab the auto-generated tarball on the GitHub release page. Download the project's own .tar.xz or clone the git repo directly, and you'll avoid whatever went sideways with the generated one.
That's not a minor nitpick. Linux users build from source more often than any other group, and a bad tarball means a broken or outdated package. Closing that hole matters more on desktop Linux than anywhere else.
If you're running it through a distro package, that path is unaffected by the .2 itself, but 5.6.2 lands in the 5.6 stable series and will filter into the various distribution builds over the coming weeks.
The OpenCL fixes hit home on Linux
Rendering work is where Linux GPU users feel the differences. Highlights reconstruction for 4BAYER (CYGM/RGBE) raw files was previously stuck at clipping-only and now does something useful. Several OpenCL paths got attention too, including a filmicrgb mask bug that produced wrong selections and, crucially, support for recent Intel graphics drivers.
For someone running darktable on an Intel Arc or Iris GPU, that last bit is worth the upgrade on its own. OpenCL detection on Linux is a minefield, and a driver-specific fix lands better here than on any other platform.
Crash fixes round out the batch the same way they do for everyone. Importing a style with an empty module order used to crash the app; now it falls back to the default order. A neural-restore denoise crash on certain sensor sizes wrote past the image edge, and that's patched. Memory leaks that grew with every imported image and every pasted history stack are now closed off.
Worth knowing before you upgrade.
Camera support stays thin this cycle. Only two new white-balance presets show up: the Leica SL3-P (DNG) and the Sony ILCE-7RM6. No new camera base support, no new noise profiles. The suspended-support list — cameras darktable can no longer find CC0 samples for — stays put, still packed with medium-format relics like the Phase One IQ250 and the Kodak EasyShare Z980.
Scripters get a fix for a Lua double-start bug that could trigger a stack overflow, and the luarc file now runs in all cases. That's the kind of thing that rarely matters until it does.
Here are the caveats worth knowing. When exporting to AVIF, EXR, JPEG XL, or XCF, darktable can't yet let you pick individual metadata fields, so those formats ship no metadata at all unless you check every box in the export preferences. macOS support has also pulled the floor, but that only bites Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.
The one that affects Linux users most is the upgrade caution. Coming from the stable 5.4 line, your edits survive the jump, but the new library database won't work back in 5.4. Take a backup, and you're safe. The building-from-source warning from above applies, of course.
Head here to the GitHub release page for the downloads, checksums, and build notes.
