I've switched to C1 when Adobe went to subscription-only, pretty happy with it. They are about to make substantial changes to their licensing though, in what looks like an effort to push users to their subscription model. No more brand-specific versions (up until now you can get a version that works with only Fujifilm or Sony cameras for a bit more than half the price), no more upgrade pricing (just a "loyalty scheme") and even less in terms of updates than you used to get with a perpetual license. You're already paying more for the perpetual version if you update every year, I guess that's going to get substantially worse.
I guess soon it'll be either a subscription or barely-usable open source like darktable, which is a shame for hobbyists. I'd love to use open source, but darktable just isn't there, by a long shot. It's godawfully slow with 26MP images on a brand-new M2 Macbook (C1 is blazingly fast in comparison), the UI is unstructured and very spartan, lots of UI flicker and glitches that become super annoying after a while, no dehaze feature, shadow detail suffers in comparison to what C1 does there, etc. I bet a well-executed LR Classic/C1 competitor from Affinity would be a tremendous success.
I guess soon it'll be either a subscription or barely-usable open source like darktable, which is a shame for hobbyists. I'd love to use open source, but darktable just isn't there, by a long shot. It's godawfully slow with 26MP images on a brand-new M2 Macbook (C1 is blazingly fast in comparison), the UI is unstructured and very spartan, lots of UI flicker and glitches that become super annoying after a while, no dehaze feature, shadow detail suffers in comparison to what C1 does there, etc. I bet a well-executed LR Classic/C1 competitor from Affinity would be a tremendous success.