Hacker News Reader

Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Inkscape is one of those programs that I have a love/hate relationship with.

I’m not a heavy user; when I use it, I’m coming at as a novice, usually with a specific task in mind and I find that I might as well have Inkscape open on half the screen and Google open on the other half as I have to search for how to do anything. Once I find it, it works fine, but the UI seems the exact opposite of approachable for me. (It feels in many regards like Gimp was 10 years ago; I have no idea if Gimp got better because I gave up on it with enough good alternatives. Inkscape is better than that, but it gives me the same feeling of “does this really need to be this hard to import a multi-color SVG and make a slight touch up?”)

View on HN

I have the same feeling. Using a SVG editor shouldn't be that hard (drawling lines, filling shapes etc.) but somehow doing anything in Inkscape is so confusing I was never able to do even the simplest task with it.

> I have no idea if Gimp got better because I gave up on it with enough good alternatives.

It didn't. I upgraded back to 2.6 and stopped updating when 2.8 broke saving files, and going by hearsay, it's continued to get worse since.

What are the alternatives to Gimp that you like?

Not OP but I have been loving Krita. More intuitive interface with many of the same features.

Krita is good. I like that there are so many eraser buttons.

Also works great on android.

I should give it a try on Android again. I tried loading it up on my phone once and wasn't able to access some of the menus. I'm sure it's better-suited for a tablet

Krita is nice, but not as mature as GIMP, and it can be a bit crashy.

FWIW, I can't recall Krita ever crashing on me this past year. I do agree it's a younger/less mature project though.

It crashes a lot on me on both the latest macOS and on Ubuntu 18.04.

That said, I'm not one to lose patience on FOSS and know it can and will improve.

Don't really know about macOS, but Ubuntu 18.04 is a distro with, what, 6 years old packages ? There have been a lot of bugfixes to the whole stack since then which will never make it to older Ubuntus - remember than the "stable" in linux distros means "does not change", not "does not crash".

That's poor reasoning for multiple reasons:

- Krita also crashed on me when Ubuntu 18.04 was recent.

- Most Krita crashes are on startup, before I do anything.

- GIMP never crashes on me with heavy usage. In fact, few graphics manipulation apps crash on me.

- Finally, like I said, Krita crashes often on the latest macOS.

I think the "blame" is entirely on Krita. That said, I'm patient and understand software has bugs; Krita will be stabilized eventually.

you should try it with flatpak on a distro that old. Old distros are fine for servers but I would never use something that old as a desktop.

sigh

Why? Krita never worked right, even in macOS latest or in Ubuntu 18.04 when it was new.

My Ubuntu 18.04 is extremely stable, nothing else crashes (not regularly anyway, there's no OS in the world where apps won't occassionally crash). And I game with Steam on it and use it for mostly everything, and it's an extremely stable, pleasant environment.

Finally, there's a complete logical disconnect here: OSes don't magically become unstable as they age. That's magical thinking. If anything, newer, less proven versions are more likely to be unstable.

And finally finally, other people in this thread are complaining about Krita's instability, so I'm not an outlier.

Please, address what I actually wrote. Thanks.

I think that maybe the previous poster was trying to say that recent versions of Krita are more stable, i.e. they crash less often. This has been my experience. Should you try Krita again, I recommend installing a recent release (5+), even if it's not yet available through Ubuntu's official packages yet. Hopefully you'll have a more pleasant experience!

Yeah, the crashing on Krita gets me.

For simple stuff there's Pinta, for complex stuff Krita.

On windows there's also Paint.NET which is Pinta on steroids.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com