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Comment by thallavajhula | Hacker News Reader

It is hard to replicate or actually compete with proper proprietary design tools. There's a ton of UX and performance enhancements that are done over the years and IMHO OSS can never get to that. I'm speaking specifically about design tools. There have been a lot of tools that have been around with not a lot of adoption. I like and appreciate the effort and it is definitely a massive effort to build these OSS alternatives to design tools, but it is hard to actually pick, use, and make them your daily drivers. Design tools is one of those categories of software where proprietary is definitely a better choice to choose over OSS.

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Inkscape is a daily driver for me and its OSS

It has its quirks and even some annoying bugs but where it excells its IMO way better than what any competing/proprietary design tool can do (vector and bitmap exporting, vector+bitmap combined layering, shape/colors/text layout, PDF editing/creating, vector pen tool, etc). I use it to create UI for games & apps and more generally to build sprawling UX scenarios and concept flowcharts.

In more recent builds its performance has become quite good which was a problem it had before. Granted, lots of room for improvement still particularly wish it had more natural flowcharting capability.

Inkscape is amazing, and it's had incredible growth. I remember using it 5+ years ago and it was incredibly buggy and the UX was terrible. I now use it extensively and it rocks.

Concurring that Inkscape today is awesome, while it definitely was not a decade ago (how the time flies... and decade ago it was already... ten years old or so!).

Disclaimer: I'm an engineer not a UX/UI designer, and I use Inkscape mostly for graphic designs and the odd super-simple CAD stuff where I don't think starting qcad is worth it. Still, I'm immensely happy that I can just get stuff done in Inkscape and that everything inside makes sense and is generally discoverable "solely by logic".

Nice hearing about Inkscape, I have to give it a try now that I’ve quit Paydobe.

Is Inkscape good for svgs?

SVG is Inkscape's native file format (albeit it adds some of its own extensions by default), so yes.

Yeah it's great for SVGs. I still use illustrator because the type tools are a lot easier to work with for constant use,I already have a CC subscription grandfathered in at a cheap rate, and some things in it I'm just plain-old used to... But I could deal with Inkscape if I decided to dump Adobe. Gimp not so much. I'd definitely be buying affinity's photo editor or something for raster work.

Indeed, that is primarily where it excels. Your layered source files are SVG and you can export to SVG (and you can import in SVG obviously). The bitmap selection/exporting is also excellent as such you can have these massive vector canvases (with any number of bitmaps and vector shapes/graphics mixed in) and quickly export any slice or selection you make without having to resize the canvas or copy/paste somewhere - and it will remember the export path when you click on the object or layer again later (aside from a bug with symlinks on Linux); ideal for iterative work/exporting revisions to clients or colleagues.

Another vote for Inkscape here - amazing tool. I probably use less than 1% of it's functionality, but it is far and away the best PDF editor I've come across (I work with a lot of design drawings that started life as DWG/CAD files, are exported to PDF and sent around for proofing/review and need to have changes marked up on them).

> IMHO OSS can never get to that.

Because of the economics of software R&D. Professionals are not willing to stand around a tool that does not do what they need to make money themselves. They simply want to pay and use for a "finished" product, but never stop to consider that (a) software is never finished and (b) funding its development does not mean that you need to use it exclusively.

Companies/professionals would stand to benefit a lot if they funded FOSS alternatives, even if just as an hedge against their "main" tool. Imagine if every design agency got 5% of their "Adobe Tax" and donated to the devs of Penpot, Gimp and Inkscape. No strings attached, just with a "here, none of you need to worry about funding". In just a couple of years all these OSS tools would catch up, and the companies would be able to at the very least use the existence of FOSS alternative as a negotiation tactic when dealing with sales team from Adobe.

Companies do hedge on OSS. A lot of OSS projects are sponsored by for-profit companies. Epic was (is?) the biggest sponsor of Blender foundation.

Not as hedge, though. They invest in it because they use it.

I don't think that matters. If a tool isn't as good as the leading closed source commercial offering there are still good reasons to use it - you might not get enough value to make it worth paying, using open source might be an ethical choice, the open version might still be good enough, and so on.

It's not like there aren't commercial design tools other than Figma either. People choose to use and pay for those tools instead of Figma. The idea that there's one 'industry standard' choice and everything else is wrong is obviously nonsense. Having an OSS option as well is only a good thing.

People have been tooting the same horn for decades. And it's true, but if some OSS becomes mainstream, like Blender, all the sudden, the UX gets fixed.

Blender was a commercial product before becoming OSS, and some of the original folks are still around.

Blender has been open source for over 20 years. UX of the proprietary version was dismal.

Its just proves that UX can get better. Blender has had particularly bad UX (when it was commercial soft) and 3D is one of the most challenging software.

Its just mostly about focus of the project and agency of people trying to make UX better.

Yea, the question really is will the OSS tool survive long enough to have the UX fixed. In Blender's case, yes, but that's not been true for many other OSS projects. Just look at how many dead electron projects are floating around the internet.

Arguably it's more important to create software that solves a problem first so there is an incentive for people to keep using it. But the less people use it, the longer it will take for the UX to improve organically (see Blender and Inkscape).

I'm not sure how I feel about Blender, the UI in the older versions was notoriously niche if not outright confusing. Here's a video comparing the versions in a simple example task: https://youtu.be/Vz_GxPMActM

Whatever caused it to succeed and catch enough attention to be continuously improved, I'm thankful for that. Same as with game engines like Godot and other similar FOSS projects, maybe even LibreOffice not dying like OpenOffice did, though that's a whole tale in of itself. Actually, I'll similarly celebrate improvements in proprietary software, too.

Then again, I still think that Inkscape and some of the other software that gets touted as good is actually not very usable, so I'm a bit opinionated.

Bad UX is one big reason for not becoming mainstream

Developers create crappy open source communities that only a certain sort of developer can even bare being involved in, let alone anyone with another skill set (like UX design), and still, in the year 2024, routinely belittle these skill sets, then proceed the crank out the most obviously “designed by engineers” looking interfaces you’ve ever seen, say “but it’s for power users, you just have to learn it!”, and call it a day.

Honestly, so many projects simply reap what they sow here.

Yeah I’m a UX designer (and dev) and the hostility toward UX and UX principles in the open source community is disheartening, for sure. People use things that are easy and pleasant to use. That shouldn’t be controversial.

(As far as this program is concerned, my general thoughts are — give it a few years. It took Figma years to supplant Sketch, it took Sketch years to supplant the Adobe suite. I think that the desire from the community is there, as there are really scummy business practices that the Figma team has put in place, and it’s squeezing departments/seats/licenses, which is stupid obvious artificial scarcity that they’re using to extract as much as they can before something useful and FOSS comes around and eats their lunch.)

GitLab is an example of a company that started by heavily being influenced by GitHub and building a business around it.

Figma is stupid expensive, especially when you onboard developers, so it seems like a GitLab esque play could be disruptive.

I wonder if over time a tool that blends the developer, product and design experience more seamlessly will catch on. Having reactive code that is driven by the underlying design in a cohesive way perhaps.

Bad thing about Figma is it isn't clear at all that you're causing new subscriptions. If you just share with someone you begin incurring more subscriptions and an admin has to go through and prune them every so often, it'll also happily charge you for empty seats that don't even specifically get filled with new shares, it creates new seats instead.

Have you tried penpot? Or are you talking about that time you tried gimp or Inkscape? And what about Blender?

Or Krita, just started playing with that recently and WOW

Blender is very impressive proof that with a few years of hard work you can go from one of the worst examples of bizarre "open source ui/ux" into something very usable. Never would have thought it possible a decade ago.

Wasn't it closed source UI/UX from Not a Number Technologies?

A few years of hard work made possible by substantial injections of cash by a lot of the big players in the industry. Epic, Nvidia, Amd, Amazon, Intel, Meta etc. I'm sure the $150k/mo of continuous donation support also helps.

In this aspect, Blender is a very unique OSS project.

Krita is a great counterexample for your claim.

> IMHO OSS can never get to that

Uh, why? It's not magic. Sure, it's a problem that most OSS projects don't focus on UX and perf, but there's no intrinsic reason why they couldn't.

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