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Steps to build and install darktable from source on Linux Mint.

Tested versions

• Tested with darktable 3.4.1 and Linux Mint 20.1
• Tested with darktable 3.6.0 and Linux Mint 20.2

Install Dependencies

Install minimal dependencies:

sudo apt get udo apt-get install gcc g++ cmake intltool xsltproc libgtk-3-dev libxml2-utils libxml2-dev liblensfun-dev librsvg2-dev libsqlite3-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff5-dev liblcms2-dev libjson-glib-dev libexiv2-dev libpugixml-dev git

Install optional dependencies. Highly recommended if you want a full darktable installation. This will install all optional dependencies except GMIC and LIBAVIF for the following reasons:

• Mint 20.1 ships with libgmic-dev 2.4.5 and darktable requires >= 2.7, so it can't be installed using official repository.
• The package libavif-dev still doesn't support AVIF enconding on Debian based distributions using official repository.

sudo apt-get install libgphoto2-dev libsoup2.4-dev libopenexr-dev libwebp-dev libopenjp2-7-dev libsecret-1-dev libgraphicsmagick1-dev libcolord-dev libcolord-gtk-dev libcups2-dev libosmgpsmap-1.0-dev libopenjp2-7-dev python3-jsonschema llvm-11-dev clang libimage-exiftool-perl liblua5.3-dev libsaxon-java openjdk-14-jre imagemagick fop po4a clang-tools-11

Get Source Code and build

git clone https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable.git
cd darktable
# Stay on the master branch to compile latest development version or
# find the latest release. In this example it's release-3.4.1:
git checkout release-3.4.1
git submodule init
git submodule update
./build.sh

Install

When compiling finished you will get a note about the install command. Execute it. It will be something like this:

sudo cmake --build "./build" --target install -- -j8

Run Darktable

You can now run darktable or create a link to your desktop for easier use:

/opt/darktable/bin/darktable