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Comment by dobladov | Hacker News Reader

I love Inkscape, but really the performance in mac is completely insufficient, each action takes at least 1 second to load.

Probably is not their fault or main target OS, but is so hard to find a free or open source alternative with the same functionality for mac.

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Yeah. I have absolutely no right to complain for the price, and even without dividing by zero Inkscape is still extraordinary, but it doesn't work for my workflow. I like to snap pictures of things (mechanical assemblies or circuit boards, typically) and annotate them. Inkscape chugs hard with even a modest image in the background, so I stick with an old CS6 illustrator license or iPad apps.

One thing that might help: try linking the image instead of embedding it.

The rendering chugs, I mean -- evidently, it's still entirely CPU-side and doesn't do so great with camera-sized images. I should also specify that I'm on Windows, but have tried Linux too. I think it's probably just a matter of putting enough dev time into the GPU renderer.

Does anyone know why it is so excruciatingly slow? I always just switch to Windows to use Inkscape but it would be good to know the reason.

I think it has something to do with gtk3 under mac. This will probably be fixed with the gtk4 port.

Some has investigated the a slow gtk3 program on Mac and found the program was spending a second drawing shadows under 4 (I guess) buttons.

That's downright impressive!

There is an alpha version of inkscape that runs natively on Mac (without requiring XQuartz). Not without bugs (text seems to give it trouble for some reason, among a few other things), but it works pretty well IMO. Definitely excited to see this moving forward.

I just have always had a lot of problems in general with GTK programs on Mac (well, admittedly I've used just GIMP and Inkscape) that involve scrolling and zooming with Magic Mouse. The action is just not smooth and jumpy, which makes things imprecise, which is incredible frustrating for graphics programs. Not to mention it isn't a good user experience.

I've seen an open ticket that puts points the finger at refresh rates being out of sync. Don't know if a traditional scroll wheel would fix it, but I really like my Magic Mouse.

GTK4 had a huge performance improvement on macOS, maybe projects will get there.

Great to hear, but didn't GIMP just make the switch to 3?

The performance is great on Windows. The main issue with Inkscape in the past was lack of proper CYMK support. I'd do all the work in Inkscape then bring into Illustrator.

Adobe software these days is just slow and painful to use.

Do you have a good reason to be using newer versions of Adobe software? After all, the old ones do still exist, and most of the interchange formats haven't changed in a while.

So far as I can tell, the primary good reason to maintain a modern version of Adobe products is so that they can interoperate with other people's modern version of Adobe products. (Though I understand Photoshop has released some nice new features recently.) Indeed, you could even have a recent version when needed and a faster, leaner, older version for quotidian work.

Older Adobe releases do not run on current Macs. Not a problem for Windows versions, but it is a problem for Mac versions.

Ah, that's a bit of a shame. That said, if people are willing to pay the premium to run Macs, they should probably expect to need to keep upgrading their machines to maintain a level of stability. (It's not good, but it is how the cookie crumbles)

I run an older 2012 Mac and don’t experience that often.

I have an M1 mac and on standard configuration it’s unusably slow. I’m talking about 1 FPS. In low resolution mode (removing the high res flag from the manifest) it’s just usable (and still painful).

I have yet to try it, but maybe there’s a way of going through XQuartz, which might help. I hear they recently switched to GTK’s direct Quartz backend, which I can imagine is causing the problems.

> I have an M1 mac and on standard configuration it’s unusably slow.

Is that using a native build or via Rosetta?

Both.

Yep, the mac performance got so bad that I was forced to buy Affinity Designer, which is just a much better experience anyway.

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