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Comment by zibzab | Hacker News Reader

To avoid the extreme slowdown (and crash after a while) on win10, close the document property tab (!!)

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...

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It's easy to forget that Inkscape is run purely with volunteers, is a charity with 0 employees. I get that these problems are frustrating but maybe it would be more appropriate to wonder how is even possible that this project runs so well :D. Some technical problems are outside our power. Mainly performance regression was introduced by gtk3. Which was a big blow to the whole project because it took 5years of work. And in the end, we discovered that technology is just slow and we need to migrate once again if we want to fix it. Bugs are not ignored we just simply don't have enough manpower to fix them all

I hear you, and as a FOSS maintaineryaelf I agree that it is frustrating to see all complaints but no volunteers.

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.

i hope you dont take this wrong way but ... what you are suggesting is if you cannot do it ""proplerly'" dont do it at all ... testing such a huge project as inkscape is a lot of work. perosnaly i do it a lot but sometimes you just cannot catch it all. "We" dont have receorses we have just developers that are sometimes work on stuff

That sucks about GTK. Probably would make more sense to use Qt. It's much better.

Both Wireshark and VLC successfully migrated to it, though I guess they have somewhat simpler GUIs.

grass is always greener on a other side. And rewriting to Qt would be as big as starting new projcet from scratch

> grass is always greener on a other side

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...

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.

Do you think you or the parent commenter can look into debugging or fixing the bugs yourself? I'm also disappointed at buggy software, poorly considered changes, and maintainers ignoring bug reports. But (sometimes) I try (and occasionally succeed) to fix bugs I encounter.

Debugging and contributing to large and complex C++ projects is not trivial. I personally do debug and contribute to open source projects using technologies I’m confident with, but when it comes to Inkscape I can’t do much more than to do nothing and to hope for the best.

Filing reproducible issues is probably a good start and anybody can do it

Yeap! As a developer, having a well described bug, with clear steps and conditions, is sometimes 90% of the work needed to fix it.

A good issue report requires some knowledge and expertise though. Anyone can say it doesn’t work as expected, but it’s harder to identify and reproduce the problem and provide all the useful details.

Not sure about how the story with Inkscape looks, but it can be difficult to deliver the reproducible issue. You might have to build it yourself, might have to install a compiler in the right version and so on. Depending on the build story of Inkscape, this can take days of fumbling. Not many users are willing to go through that.

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.

Affinity Designer is a pretty good tool for vector drawings (for 55$ unique payment). It fills the gap between Inkscape and Illustrator.

Affinity seems like it doesn't have some of the more precise layout tools and SVG-editing capabilities that Inkscape does.

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.

When I was still using Windows I was using corel draw. I still believe it was (and I suspect still is) the best vector drawing program for more technical drawings. Just one example:alignment is really deeply build into the system using a set of keyboard shortcuts so instead of always going to the align and distribute tab you just pressed "e" to align the previous object. It was really so much faster for drawing than illustrator or inkscape.

Unfortunately there is no Linux version otherwise I'd happily buy it.

You're right, the power of Inkscape is its ability to work natively with SVG capabilities and its technical aspects (instead of some obscure proprietary format). Affinity is more artist-focused.

I've been working with graphics for a couple decades and I have many old files in formats that I can no longer open. I am strongly biased towards Inkscape for its use of an open standard as its file format.

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.

Check Boxy SVG for an SVG-focused vector graphics editor. Its UI is heavily inspired by Inkscape and the Linux version is available for free (you just have to run "snap install boxy-svg").

Thank you! Looks like exactly what I needed.

I'm pleased with their development pace. Every new release has lots of good changes, plus I believe they are fighting technical cruft under the hood.

Oh, that's a fun one; my document property tab disappeared once and I wasn't able to retrieve it. I don't know if that was when I started having issues, but no amount of reboots without the document property tab felt like it fixed it for me.

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