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I got into more serious photography and then, later, working from raw files, quite a while after I ditched Windows, so all of the adoobe, etc, stuffhas not been an option for me.

I began by tweaking jpegs with GIMP. Then I gave Raw Therapee a try, then I moved to darktable, where I am almost certainly going to stay indefinitely. GIMP is not a raw processor.

If you start using rt/dt/gimp/etc, you will find the pixls.us forums to be invaluable. Support? Haha, you can talk to expert users and even developers there. Just... don't start your first post "I just came from lightroom and wish you guys would make darktable more like it."  LOL.

They say that darktable has a steep learning curve. Frankly, you can produce nice pictures right from the off with just a small number of modules. It is not  that hard to get started. But when one is used to a software package, there is always a muscle-memory problem.

There is a host of learning resources for darktable on youtube, from beginners' stuff to techniques that still leave me baffled. Look on the bright side: it is a package that one is always going to be learn more about and get more out of

Get a good deal from Adobe if you can. Good luck with that: obviously it is the least disruptive option. If not, it costs nothing to try darktable on Win, Mac or Linux and it goes on costing nothing.  Take a look if and when  you feel like it.