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Comment by comezkandirali | Hacker News Reader

Why don’t they provide a desktop version, similar to software such as GIMP, Inkscape, and others? Do they believe they cannot achieve the desired revenue through crowdfunding? Many projects—most notably Blender—have been highly successful using this approach. It seems unreasonable that an average designer should be required to learn server administration

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I am not sure what you are really asking here. They have almost 20k commits of frontend and server code [0] over half a decade of development. What would a desktop version of this look like outside of a bundled Tauri/Electron wrapper?

[0]: https://github.com/penpot/penpot

I am not a software developer. There are many people who think like me...

The closest analogy would be Sketch for macOS, which Figma simply copied at first, and then mostly replaced. I would love to see open source Sketch for open source systems.

You mean which Figma replaced in the market, because they were not limited to a native app?

This is imo a cautionary tale that being a native app primarily is a bad idea in this year.

From the user perspective Figma is great, and I might say it’s even better. However, all that came from throwing more money into the problem, I believe. Figma just won because they invested unlimited money into this, while Sketch might be self-funding, if I’m correct here. To me this is rather ‘money is a very nice asset to have’ kind of thing.

Very different strategies. Sketch has been self-funding and sustainable from day 1. They have had 20m funding recently, but a fraction of Figma's 749m.

Figma lost over 1bn in Q3 on revenues of 274m. Share price is down 70% from IPO 3 months ago.

It's also clear from Figma's latest product releases - a grab bag of unfinished AI tools and a laughably shoddy website builder - that their primary audience is investors and not end users. I don't think the market of product designers is large enough to support their valuation and have any hope of making a decent return unless they diversify rapidly into other areas and try to become the next Adobe. Meanwhile Canva and more AI native tools are busy biting at their heels.

Speaking as a daily user, I hope they stay around long-term and don't enshittify themselves too much. But I'm not optimistic.

Thanks for your input. Personally, I wildly agree, but I couldn’t write it better myself.

Figma has set an expectation for designers that their projects support multi-user editing by default and are available to clients, teammates and stakeholders without having to install anything. Its hard to go against that kind of productivity in any org.

Penpot provides the same.

I’m actually surprised it delivers on the promise. Last time I checked it a couple of years back, it was nowhere near.

Sketch copied Fireworks, which Adobe abandoned after buying out Macromedia. I knew XD would fail, which is funny because Adobe had the best UI tool but didn’t know what to do with it.

They still are really clueless, Animate has had hardly any updates in 13yrs, yet other animation tools offer a lot of innovative features.

As a pro user of Flash (pre-Adobe) I don’t even surprised Animate is dead. ‘Why bother renaming it?’ was my initial thought back then. I was very good at the instrument, but the instrument was so bad (imo it got even worse when Adobe bought Macromedia), that I was among those who expected the inevitable death of the instrument. I’m happily using open source instruments these days, and while not everything is as easy as it was with the Flash (here I mean rather the web, not animation as a whole), the ability to work comfortably and pick my instruments as much as I like, it makes all the difference in the world.

There is in fact an effort to make a desktop application!

Source (& releases): https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop

Topic on penpot forum: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...

I am referring to the convenience of being able to download it from the store and start using it immediately. If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users

https://penpot.app/ you don't have to download it at all :)

Thanks for the information, but I was talking about the advantage of local usability.

> If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users

Almost certainly not. If you need this kind of tool, you'll either self-host it, use the hosted version or use Figma. There are no comparable offline-only alternatives. What users are they using exactly?

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