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Comment by krzat | Hacker News Reader

I like Inscape but I wish they added GPU acceleration, at least for moving things. It's unbearably slow on macOS.

Have they finally started shipping builds for Mac that don't depend on X11 to run? Because that'd be a prerequisite for performing halfway decently on macOS.

Inkscape is (speaking generally here, not just about performance) pretty good on Linux, tolerable on Windows, and awful on Mac. That's kind of a hole that a lot of cross-platform apps get stuck in, though-- especially GTK apps (which, historically, haven't supported the Mac well at all), but even QT (which at least tries to automatically adapt to macOS idioms) doesn't quite get it right. MacOS UI conventions are just too far away from Windows and Linux conventions to expect to be able to get them for free.

What are the problems with Qt on Mac?

I can confirm that the Mac version doesn't require X11.

Would it be possible to ship something like Inkscape with a web/browser interface?

Yes, browsers (especially Chrome) are capable of doing this. There are a few browser based vector editors (Gravit, Method Draw, Vectr, Janvas, Boxy). None of them is perfect, some are slow, and especially when it comes to complex drawings or advanced features like boolean operations and path offsetting, most of them run into serious issues. But you can expect to see a browser based Inkscape replacement within the next two years.

you can also try to launch Inkscape with GDK_BACKEND=broadway and open it in a browser

It seems very doable with flutter, as it GPU accelerated by default and can compile to web.

It didn't require x11 last time I checked, but startup was startup and some operations were quiet slow.

Yeah, removal of the X11 dependency on Mac was one of the major features of the v1.0 release a few months ago IIRC.

FWIW, at some point last year, I switched away from Illustrator to using Inkscape, for better native SVG support. On my wacom-enabled Coffee Lake Thinkpad, I've yet to find an app in either Windows or MacOS that's as responsive to pen input as Inkscape is under Linux.

It's just a shame that Gnome support for mobile Intel graphics sucks so badly.

Performance on the first non-X11 release was unbearable (compared to merely slow for the previous release). I don't know if that's been fixed -- I'm still on the old X11 release.

There was a GSoC project for it this year, but I can't find any actual code: https://linkmauve.fr/blog/2020/06/12/bringing-gpu-accelerati...

Do they even have MacOS packages for the newer versions?

yes

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/jobs

Its also single core...

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