Inkscape 1.1.2
inkscape.org
inkscape.org
Don't get me wrong: Inkscape is huge, it's quite an achievement and I'm glad we got an open source vector app. But everything feels so strange and awkward to use. And when you get further with your project, the input lag gets out of hand. Path effects and filters are cool, but the UI feels... Just strange. And they add even more lag to everything.
Oh and there's also the random crash now and then...
The exporting side could use some love too. You need to fallback to the commandline to export all layers or groups for example. But it's really cumbersome. And for some reason you can't even disable anti-aliased edges and it cuts of filters. Oh well...
Unfortunately I don't have enough time to contribute, sorry. Bought Affinity Designer this week and immediately fell in love. Everything just works, the UI is well thought out and it's snappy.
I don't know: I love open source. For example Blender or Gimp are great and improved massively over the years. We need something like Inkscape, but the current state simply doesn't cut it for me, sorry.
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.
Sadly, my experience seems to mirror yours, my first project crashed (no data loss, fortunately). Then I tried writing a simple plugin and it turned out 1.1.1 broke unit conversion.
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.
Just tried it: open svg, select path, menu: object -> fill & stroke, change the color, menu: file -> save as. Done...
You lose 90% of the people here. One click should make the fill color changeable, two clicks the border color, and bring up / highlight the relevant panel automatically.
there is multipl ways how to skin a cat . you can single clisk to cahnge color fill. selct object an chose color from pallet down or click on color in info bar that wil open fill and stroke panelOne small gripe I have is that it doesn’t support many transforms in SVG without rasterizing them, where Inkscape often does.
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!
You realise that coming in new and wanting to immediately overhaul the UI/UX is not a sociable thing to do, right? In fact, people new to a project suggesting a huge overhaul is generally a red flag for their understanding of the project or their likelihood of being a good-faith contributor.
I do agree that the UI/UX of several tools needs an overhaul. Given the history of such efforts across many open source projects, it seems likely that a fork is the only way to pull that off. You'd need a talented UI (and fixup dev) team to make it worthwhile.
You realize it needs to be done, right? :/ You realize this attitude is likely what prevents it getting done?
I’m sure I’m not the first person to go through that experience, and; again - this needs to happen in the actual build, not a fork.
Stepping in with a replace-the-whole-UI idea is generally combative in nature and may engender combative responses. Rather than being surprised at the response, maybe think about whether what you did might cause it.
By odd analogy, it's like you're starting a career as a traffic engineer and immediately demanding the road surfaces get replaced, without demonstrating an understanding of why the road surface is the way it is or why projects to replace the road surface tend to fail.
(I'm not involved with the project, so my attitude doesn't matter and you don't need to worry about what I think.)
I have used Gimp regularly and still like it, but it is... different, and not in a good way.
The fiasco that is exporting / saving for example, clearly shows that core developers don't care about users much. Which is fine, but it is a shame. I have stopped recommending Gimp some time ago.
What has seriously improved in Inkscape over the last decade is definitely performance. Every release, I see major perf improvements.
Blender and GIMP have both had major UI overhauls, but Blender has seen the largest. in 2019, Blender threw out their old UI and built a whole fresh one for 2.80. 2.80's UI absolutely brought it up to the same par that a lot of professional tools are at now.
I will also mention that Blender is being used __In Industry__. In 2019, Ubisoft began tossing money into the funding pool & is using it internally for their animation: https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-developm... & there's a few places it's been confirmed to be in use over in the Techways course on blender: https://techways.online/courses/blender/lessons/blender-basi...
But to your point about community: Something I had to learn long ago was that all projects, open source or not, push against "Change for Change's Sake." Several attempts had been made at updating Blender's overall look and feel but with mixed reception, even from within.
The best way to get something done in any part of a well established ecosystem is to rally some friends, get a good proof of concept working, and present it. This is how three major changes in Linux have been done: Lennart Poettering, as much as you might disagree with him, stood up and said "Sound on linux sucks because you have to do a bunch of ioctl shit. Let's make a good API and a sound server to go along with it so you get all the advantages of modern audio routing". He then stood up again and said "you know what, sysV init sucks too, let's make something that handles the configuration for the vast majority of the peripherals on a system and the services that depend on those peripherals."
The fact of the matter is that most Open Source is maintained in the spare time between meetings and shifts flipping burgers:
* Lots of FOSS projects are one person maintained, in their spare time, more and more by people working dead end hourly jobs like retail. Seriously. * The big ones out of companies are probably maintained by zero people full time.
I have no qualms with it, but the issue plagues all my Win 10 machines and I just wonder what's going on, and if I'm a select minority with it.
Besides that, thanks Inkscape for being such an incredibly useful vector tool!
Anyway, inkscape has really disappointed me with multiple serious regressions. This + UI issues + layout problems + zoom buttons disappearing + crash due to version incompatibility + not remembering what unit you use + DPI screwup got me wondering if the people in charge really got what it takes to run the biggest FOSS creativity tool.
I mean, I'm grateful if exists. But I use this for technical documents at work and I need it to be stable. Oh well, I guess it's between this and being lured into 12 month contracts with Adobe...
I took the trial after seeing people suggest it as an alternative, but it didn't quite replace my workflow and I ended up dropping it.
Unfortunately there is no Linux version otherwise I'd happily buy it.
I'm on MacOS where current versions of Inkscape are not really usable because of (understandable) performance degradations. I wish that either those problems could be solved, or that an alternative existed which used an open file format.
I'd prefer a pure FOSS solution, but as I'm a BSD-school FOSS person I wouldn't mind a proprietary app so long as that proprietary app used an open file format. It sucks that Affinity uses a proprietary format which is at high risk for orphaning or degradation either if they decide it's in their business interests or if the company ceases to exist.
I would say it is OK to open an issue, which is not 100% reproducible, as long as it has not been opened. It allows for the chance, that others can try to find that reproducible way of causing the issue, who are more knowledgable about the software and might have the dev setup already on their machines.
But, many issues in Inkscape are due to bugs introduced by changes that were not properly tested. If you have resources to change things around, you should also test the outcome properly before you hit that release button.
Both Wireshark and VLC successfully migrated to it, though I guess they have somewhat simpler GUIs.
Not really. Things are not all equally good. I don't see any effort from Wireshark or VLC to move back to GTK.
> And rewriting to Qt would be as big as starting new projcet from scratch
Well that's clearly an exaggeration but I agree it would be a huge project. I'm just dreaming...
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.
But I very much like what I’m seeing in the draft release notes for 1.2: as well as some really nice-looking functionality improvements, they mention various performance improvements in approximately the areas that had the worst regressions in 1.0 (such as zooming and panning), and UI adjustments to reduce space consumed. I haven’t tried 1.2 alpha 1 out just yet, but I probably will in the next few days and I’m really looking forward to it. (Incidentally, I’ve been back on Linux for the last ten months, and using the latest releases, since it works better under Linux, though Adwaita is still horrifically wasteful of space given Inkscape’s habit of stacking many buttons side-by-side, so I installed Minwaita which reduces that problem a lot.)
I can't agree with excluding all GNOME users from using an application, since it's not the fault of GNOME users in general that it's difficult to transition between major GTK versions.
Of course, other options in a similar space like Qt aren’t entirely better in that they don’t behave fully like GNOME on GNOME platforms. The best cross-platform native-feel apps, like Firefox, tend to use GTK on Linux (or possibly KDE/Qt in KDE?) and other things on other platforms.
As a Linux user I inevitably use quite a bit of GTK software (though barely any GNOME stuff, if you savvy the distinction I’m drawing), but I dislike almost all of the directions it’s headed in since GNOME 3. Decent scaling is one of the few redeeming features.
sprash is describing a very—ahh—ideologically pure position, but I do deeply sympathise with a desire for a return to the GTK+ 2 ways. My ideal would probably be to scrap GTK+ 3 and 4 and create 5 derived mostly from GTK+ 2’s philosophies, just including the good technical parts of 3 and 4, but determinedly not a full style unto itself. Also I’m fed up with client-side decorations matter and want better support for server-side decorations, as was done traditionally and as is still generally preferable on Windows and in most Linux window managers, or even platform-matching client-side decorations, which would be good for macOS and Windows and frankly GNOME.
GNOME has basically sabotaged GTK as a cross-platform library—even as a Linux-wide thing (apart from KDE). They’ve taken it over to serve their own purposes and vision. Their vision does improve and unify some parts of GNOME desktops, but as a user of something other than GNOME (Sway), I don’t like most of what they’ve done to GTK.
- decouples GNOME and GTK. They've created a new library, called libadwaita, that hosts the GNOME stuff.
- brings big performance improvements (it has GL and Vulkan backends)
- is much better on macOS and Windows.
Anyway, I agree with you on your points. One of the issues of opensource graphic programs is that the toolkits that are available are quite problematic/don't care about this use case. This is not just about GTK, as QT has also been causing a lot of headaches to the Krita developers. It is not by chance that Blender, which draws the UI using its own toolkit, is not affected by these issues and has a fantastic, fast UI.
• They severely damaged text rendering and initially didn’t even acknowledge it as a defect, dismissing the report: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787. More recently there’s some movement on the issue, but the initial reaction was not a good look, at least.
• Someone said various bad things about libadwaita here on HN a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30027002.
• Of accessibility, they’ve completely redesigned it, in a way that is very convincingly better, or will be once it’s all finished including supporting tooling, but the impression I’ve received from a couple of communities where it’s come up a bit at times is that at least when they released GTK 4 and told people “start adopting it!”, GTK 4 apps were opaque to screen readers, because half the plumbing was missing. This impression could be false, and if there was any lack, hopefully it’s addressed by now.
I’m curious what the state of affairs is for approximating native look and feel on Windows. GTK+ 2 had a once-fairly-decent win32 theme that became fairly significantly out of date after Windows XP, but there were also some more recent themes that did parts better (and other parts worse). I’ve never seen a Windows theme for GTK+ 3 that is even halfway decent for look, and feel is a dead loss (e.g. menu keyboard behaviour and list box popup positioning and behaviour are both just painfully wrong).
If they’re serious about cross-platform, attempting to match Windows and macOS look and feel (and completely ignoring Linux, for a while) is where effort should be placed. I don’t know if they are.
On the other topics, I'm not informed enough, but at least it's good some work on the accessibility front is happening, compared to the dire situation of the last decade... I hope that eventually the situation improves. Accessibility improvements really benefit everyone.
Regarding the matching of the look and feel... in the last few years, this mindset has become very common, where each app is an island and no effort should be made to look native, because, in fact, there is no native look anymore. Windows has always been like this, and Linux desktops have started embracing that. From the app developer perspective, it's understandable. For the user, it means giving up decades of usability studies and the pleasantness of coherence. Given this direction, I expect GTK apps to look like GTK apps wherever they run, unfortunately. On the bright side, the default look of GTK4/adwaita apps is kinda similar to what macOS and Windows 11 are going for, so at least it won't look too alien over there.
Preferrably it wouls not slow down for you, ofc, but they may well deem it out of scope of their project to fix issues for asystem, that they do not have the code for to look at where it is going wrong, or simply do not have the time and resources to deal with that. Add to that, that any day MS could destroy the fruit of that work again.
I can understand, that they don't want to invest resources into that.
I used Inkscape on Win10 recently, and also on Kubuntu (21.04 a and 21.10, I think) and the experience was comparable.
I do not like the icon themes now, they're very low contrast and difficult to decipher for me so use the old, colourful icons I'm familiar with. Apart from that and one problem with a dialog not appearing until I selected the option a second time (the XML dialog), all worked well.
I think it's difficult, a x.0 might not be snappy, might even have serious issues, but there's not enough manpower resource to address everything at once, it's going to be incremental. Holding things back would negatively impact the momentum of the project IMO, but yes may benefit an individual.
But I couldn’t even properly switch back to the Win32 theme because of severe bugs that rendered it very problematic on all displays and basically completely unusable after a bit on any comparatively small high-DPI displays like my Surface Book’s. I don’t know if any of these issues have been fixed; I did try Inkscape 1.0 final briefly but decided it was still just too bad compared to 0.92. And now I’m back on Linux and so, like the Inkscape developers, don’t care all that much about Windows any more.
(https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/-/issues/879 was my initial report, including explanation of some of the major Win32 theme regressions. Given the adjacent topic in this thread of GTK 4, the mention of overlay scrollbars in that thread points to a mess too; https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GTK#Disable_overlay_scrollb... says: “as of GTK 4, the overlay nature of the scrollbars is part of the toolkit.” Ugh, GTK is obviously not interested in being a native look-and-feel toolkit if they deliberately remove the ability to control scrollbar overlayedness at the system level or in the theme. If you require the app to switch it on, it might as well not exist. Sounds like they’re continuing with the sabotage.)
The guys there have been doing great work. Maybe they need more helping hands that care about windows.
Inkscape is still very usable/utile, but I certainly don't want that trend to continue, as it would rapidly become not so.
But then I rebuilt from master in an attempt to get a traceback or profile to report and it went away, so hopefully whatever that was has been fixed and just got released.
Though I have to say I think hiding the snap controls behind a button, as opposed to a toolbar, is a mistake.
you can also come and ask question in our officia chat https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/inkscape_extensions