Inkscape 1.1.2

The thing is, I'm spoiled. There are so many great vector applications out there. We're in an age, where we're able to run awesome vector applications in a browser. How cool is that!

I'm just saying, that Inkscape needs to massively improve to stay relevant. For example, I realized that I'm completely going crazy when an app just crashes on me. I'm not used to that anymore.

Well, I understand, that Inkscape can be usable as long as you're doing simple stuff and as long as you're staying on the happy path.

But a graphic application needs to get out of its way for the user, who just wants to be creative. And as I was using inkscape, I used more time fighting it than creating.

In my opinion it needs to completely revamp the UI and streamline everything. Similar to what Blender did. But right now, I have a harder time using Inkscape than Blender, which us not a good place for Inkscape to be in.

I don't have any performance problems and I use Inkscape quite extensively. Although I am using it on Linux. I always got the impression Inkscape and Gimp both work best on Linux.

I really like Inkscape quite a bit. But it took a lot of relearning after using Illustrator for decades. Once I got over that hump, I have very few complaints, especially for the price.

I've used Inkscape for MacOS for many years off and on. Thank you very much for having made that possible.

Recent versions have been very difficult to use because of the performance degradation. But my gratitude is not diminished even if I am basically forced to find something else.

Cross-platform GUI is an incredibly difficult problem because 1. GUIs are huge and complex, and 2. Vendor lock-in is in the interest of the platform purveyors. GTK exists in a challenging space, and I empathize not only with the downstream users such as Inkscape affected by its troubles but with the GTK developers.

If it were easy to produce a featureful, performant, and developer-friendly cross-platform GUI library, someone would have done so. The demand is so acute that many projects even resort to the outrageous brute-force approach of Electron.

I love all FOSS cross-platform GUI endeavors, even when they get tripped up. You are doing great and important work — I salute you.

Yeah, about two years ago I was trying different vector-based apps. Started with Sketch, tried Inkscape, but ended up with Affinity Designer too. The UI feels much better, and it’s far more stable.

One small gripe I have is that it doesn’t support many transforms in SVG without rasterizing them, where Inkscape often does.

Inkscape, GIMP, and Blender (haven’t tried since it’s 2.X release, but since this was true for decades, just roll with it) - have long had one thing in common that completely ruins any chance of seriously using the software for anything meaningful, for many; many people - and that - of course - is the UI/UX.

And I will deflect immediately the ‘well if you don’t like it, contribute’ to state - I’ve actually tried, in the past. I was involved with the GIMP coding community for a while post high school, because I actually do know that under this awful, counter-intuitive and ugly as all living hell software, there is actually great image rendering and editing code under there.

I’m not sure if it’s changed, I really hope it has - because it majorly turned me off of contributing to FOSS projects since - but the community was extremely hostile, at least to me - and; more importantly - nobody seemed to care about the work I was doing or wanted to do with regards to overhauling the UI/UX. It clearly wasn’t a priority for the rest of the team.

We need a dedicated team of 3-4 people to overhaul the awful useless mess of a UI/UX that a lot of these FOSS creative apps have - and it just never seems to come together, so the apps never get to a usable state in their UI/UX, so they never get as many people using them as they need to, so they never grow enough to find the team they need to in order to fix it.

I’ve been following this shit for 20 years, and at this point I’ve just given up on GIMP/Inkscape.

Unfortunately these particular projects seem to be run by people who just do not prioritize these things. I know just as well as the next back end coder that the functionality matters most. But this ‘function over form’ mentality for 20 years - in GIMP’s case - has led to one very ugly and counter-intuitive piece of software that could literally rival Photoshop if only it the team could change its mentality/philosophy a bit.

I’ve considered forking it to make something ‘usable’, but the thing is, I’d like to really help with the issue in the main app itself!