Amazing, just two days ago I was searching for a polar arrangement tool in Inkscape. FOSS tools are often worse from a UI/UX perspective, sure, but I contend that they usually provide something consumer commercial tools often don't: respect for users. I'm not necessarily talking about welcoming communities here - respect can take the form of, say, not engaging in hostilities like:
- The sword of Damocles that is renting software. Can't pay? Can't access your data. Or worse, it's gone.
- Developed-country-centric pricing models/heavy focus on newer hardware.
- Locking you out of creative uses of the software - either our way or the highway
- Effectively forced TOS or pricing changes
- Unexplained bans/AI moderation/guilt by association/becoming subject to laws not relevant to your jurisdiction
- Forced upgrades breaking workflows or removing features
- Corporate bankruptcy/"amazing journey"/sales/pivots/mergers/etc ruining your investment
- Misfeatures such as nag screens, dark patterns, engagement boosters (time wasters), unclear data collection...
- Opaque bug submission channels, limited to no access to the engineers building the thing
- Optimizing for revenue, not usefulness
There is a feature count/learning curve price for this, I will readily admit. Sometimes, untenably so. My claim is simply that FOSS tools are important as a backstop/foundation.
I feel that any problem solved exclusively by proprietary software is only solved temporarily and for a tiny percentage of the world population. If the company goes away or the IP otherwise becomes inactive, that's it. Especially with cloud software. With FOSS, the software never really goes away. The problem mostly stays solved, and anyone can resume the work if they are willing and able. I'd imagine a forked FOSS version of Win2k, VB6, or maybe the late-2000s Google indexer (bit of a stretch) would be quite successful today, for example. Guess I'll never be sure of that.
Just musing after a beer and some Red Vines - I welcome any criticism or kindred spirits.
I would add than in my opinion, Inkscape specifically has a remarkably easy learning curve and great documentation. So little learning allowed me to accomplish so much.
All very good points and I don’t disagree with you. For me the issue is that FOSS is not a good model for generating the massive investment of resources needed to solve many problems.
Inkscape is great and if your problem space happens to be adequately addressed by it then fine. It’s not anywhere close to addressing many of the use cases solved by proprietary DTP though and the pace of development is glacial.
So I appreciate FOSS and use it, and I’m very grateful for it. I just don’t buy the moral arguments. If someone wants to charge money for their software, and I think it’s worth it, I’ll pay for it. I don’t see how that’s anyone else’s business.
It's not surprising that Inkscape isn't "close to addressing many of the use cases solved by proprietary DTP", mainly because it's not really DTP software. It's Vector Graphics software.
IMO it's different for various types of softwares. I prefer my games closed-source and untamperable (by me). I prefer my operating systems open and scrutinized (althou I do have a gaming PC at home with Win10, I guess it's derivative of the closed-for-games-open-for-work thing). I can't work with the web systems I do without having access to the source. I don't care really what other people really do but I can't understand how the superior tech hasn't won out in the OS wars. I think Unix eventually will be the de-facto OS but it might take decades or centuries.
> If someone wants to charge money for their software, and I think it’s worth it, I’ll pay for it
1. No, you won't. Unless you think almost no software is worth it, or you're a billionaire. And most people don't have the money to be any of the software they would find useful (e.g. an office suite, an operating system).
2. The issue isn't whether you would pay for it or not. The issue - well, the issue for me anyway - is whether it is legitimate for the state to police the population to the extent of preventing the sharing of information, including software. I would say 'no'.
>1. No, you won't. Unless you think almost no software is worth it, or you're a billionaire.....
I think you'r interpreting what I said as buying all rights to the software outright or something. I'm not quite sure. I meant buy as in pay for the right to use it.
>the issue for me anyway - is whether it is legitimate for the state to police the population to the extent of preventing the sharing of information, including software
It's legitimate for the state to wield the powers delegated to it by the people.
Our society (I mean the west generally but other societies too) have for a very long time decided that ownership rights can be legitimately exercised on some information in some circumstances, for periods of time. I think it's legitimate to extend those protections to software.
I understand you disagree on that, but for me there's both a moral and an economic dimension to the question. Some forms of information should be shareable and in the open, where that is in the public interest, sure. Political speech for example. However where there's a creative or economic value, as with a novel or software, the fact is treating sharing it as a free speech right would be economically catastrophic.
Investment in media production including software development, writing books, creating music, making movies and TV would utterly collapse. I know technically there are theoretically alternate funding models, and even a very few examples of successful projects, but the barriers to entry and risks of such models are in practice so severe that it would still be economically and culturally devastating. That's why you're not going to get public support for such a change.
I meant the same thing. You don't have the money for it. Ok, maybe if you mortgaged your house, you might.
> It's legitimate for the state to wield the powers delegated to it by the people.
One can debate what powers have actually been legitimately delegated, if any (also depends on where in the world you live.) I argue people have certainly not delegated the power to government to prevent them from sharing copies of files and running those files.
> Our society (I mean the west generally but other societies too) have for a very long time decided that ownership rights can be legitimately exercised on some information in some circumstances
If you mean that Queen Anne decided to prop up the printers' guild, then yes:
This argument didn't hold much water before there was a decent infrastructure of free software, and by now it's completely bunk.
> Investment in ... writing books, creating music, making movies and TV would utterly collapse.
Not only would this not collapse, it would barely be impacted, seeing how people copy all of this stuff already - albeit not necessarily legally - and there are public libraries for books.
If you mean the same thing by pay for software then I’m truly lost. I pay for loads of software. I largely find it quite affordable.
As for democratic legitimacy, I think your position is absurd. There is clearly no real public appetite to change the status quo on copyright law. If there were it would be an electoral issue, and it just isn’t.
> This argument didn't hold much water before there was a decent infrastructure of free software,…
Free software covers some basic commodity software and infrastructure needs and that’s about it. The first areas to be covered were tools and applications needed by software developers, text editors, compilers and such.
Beyond that the development of FOSS applications was very slow and incomplete. Meanwhile commercial software saw massive investment and the development of a plethora of both general and niche applications, including in many areas no FOSS applications even exist to this day.
The commercial software industry consists of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in software globally very year. It employs many tens of millions of developers, but also artists, designers, researchers, QA testers, trainers, and domain experts in almost every field of human endeavour that contribute to the refinement of the software. The FOSS ecosystem is pitifully tiny in comparison and it’s finding Morris can’t hope to come close to providing a viable alternative.
I’ll give two example from personal experience. In one job I worked for an independent software vendor that developed an application for designing cellular radio networks. It used terrain data and radio propagation modelling formulas to calculate signal strength and interference maps to help cellular network companies optimise their antenna placement and orientation. This was in the late 90s. No FOSS solutions exist in this space even today, developing the software took the input from a team of radio engineers as well as developers. The company also employed professional technical writers, application support personnel, trainers, a whole ecosystem of professionals.
The next job I worked at was an ISV developing derivatives trading applications for banks, pension funds and such. The software included front ends for traders, order routing servers, and interface gateways that connected to derivatives markets all over the world. Again the input from domain experts in trading was key, software developers on their own needed help to understand what traders needed, and how markets work.
Again, no open source solutions like that exist, and I don’t see any funding model coming along to address a need like this.
Even when FOSS does address a market need for applications, it often lags decades behind commercial applications, and is highly derivative of them, simply copying commercial application designs. People simply can’t wait half a lifetime for FOSS developers to get around to addressing a requirement, when commercial vendors can marshal
Millions of dollars of investment to get useful applications to market in just a year or two.
> If you mean the same thing by pay for software then I’m truly lost. I pay for loads of software. I largely find it quite affordable.
So, you're rich, or you magically avoid the expensive software. Just as an example: Suppose I live in Peru and make the median income of ~3800 USD/year. Just a license for photoshop sets me back 252 USD/yes, or over 6.6% of my gross annual income. If you consider my taxes and very modest expenses, this becomes more like 10-15% of my free gross annual income. For a single application. Now suppose I want to buy a hundred apps or so (some subscription-based, some one-off). I won't be able to repay the debt before I'm dead.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, clearly enough people do pay for commercial software to fund it's development, otherwise it wouldn't get funded. Therefore, as a matter of gob-smackingly obvious reality, it is affordable enough for the model to work. I feel bad for Peruvians that can't afford it, I hope they find a way to get by, but that doesn't make the existence of commercial software a bad thing.
> So I appreciate FOSS and use it, and I’m very grateful for it. I just don’t buy the moral arguments. If someone wants to charge money for their software
FOSS isn't about it being free though. You've already stated the issue:
> FOSS is not a good model for generating the massive investment of resources
That doesn't mean FOSS is has as a moral to not charge for software.
Great to see the project moving along, but it's been a persistent feeling of mine that FOSS is starting to get left behind in the dust. The design space has been very rapidly moving towards online, live collaboration tools like Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, etc and FOSS just has no answer for this market. Even a lot of the big name proprietary tools are finding themselves becoming rapidly obsolete in a world where people want to IM a link and just have it reflect the latest version rather than attaching files back and forth.
It's not even clear how FOSS would even work in this market or how it would benefit the user when it would be hosted all on someone else's server with self hosting diminishing the ease of collaboration.
Hm, I don't think online tools are that far ahead. If I look at the horrible experience, which is Google docs or MS Office 365, especially their word processing parts, they lack behind soooo much compared to a tool like Libreoffice. You cannot even properly use styles and, if I got a few $currency for every silly bug I encountered in those online half-assed tools, I would probably work half time only. If that experience is anything to go by for the design space, then I would rather work offline and without collaboration, than having to worry about my whole document getting completely messed up by some silly bug.
> If I look at the horrible experience, which is Google docs or MS Office 365, especially their word processing parts, they lack behind soooo much compared to a tool like Libreoffice. You cannot even properly use styles…
As a reasonably serious user of Office 365 and someone who's desperately wanted to like LibreOffice, I'm not sure what you could mean by "properly use styles". I'm guessing this is specifically a critique of the Word web app, but the native Office apps also do "online, live collaboration", and it all generally just works. Even Apple's overlooked suite feels more mature (and offers a dramatically better user experience) than LibreOffice.
Depends on what you want to do... I find LibreOffice fine because if I want to create documents that are actually complex I'm going to reach for InDesign or LaTeX. I don't find something like Microsoft Word really much better for anything I'd want to do with it than LibreOffice.
If I just want to make notes, I'll use Org or Markdown in plain text. These can also be converted to HTML for web.
If I want to print something with lots of text, nothing beats LaTeX.
If I am making something design intensive, I'll use Scribus or some other desktop publishing software.
I guess regular people think of word processors as the Swiss army knife here: does everything, not particularly well, but worth only having to learn one software?
Libre office is pretty much the only game in town on Linux. Well excepting the web based office suites. I really like it, especially for csv files which it works great for.
Hey now it’s unfair to limit this to just their online verions. I have reproducible word bugs that date back to word 2007.
Microsoft in my opinion is a company that writes good core logic followed by trainwreck UI/UX teams only eclipsed in their destructive cabability by the user hostile marketing and profit department who keep trying to get me to do stuff like upload sensitive documents to OneDrive through some absolutely intended bad UI, or default to the most expensive resource selection in Azure every time you hit the back button on their forms.
In contrast to your anecdote, I have never had issues with Google docs. It has always just worked, reasonably clean interface. I'm not sure what elaborate styling you need, but it seems serviceable for when you need a basic document which I imagine is most peoples use case. Also the collaboration is actually very useful. The same reason I use overleaf as an interface for a lot of my LaTeX projects. I can quickly share and get updates, they just have to open their browser instead of download pdf > open it in their pdf viewer > make comments > send it back etc. The web interface is great for people that do not use git etc.
That’s exactly the problem; Google Docs’ use case is only “share a basic document and collaborate on the words.”
It’s not capable of creating precise or maintainable documents (e.g. no styles as others have mentioned), which is a very common need that it’s adjacent enough to that lots of people use it for and then it fails.
What is a style? Are you trying to create a poster or do some graphic design? Some weird xml style sheet thing? Yes it’s not for that, but then also doing that in libre office or word also sounds horrible and unmaintainable.
To define a custom style in a word processing context means to define "a group of settings that I can apply at will to parts of the text".
That is, I should be able to define a "Code block" style that should appear in the same dropdown where google docs lets you select heading levels. When I select that "Code block" style, the app should format the selected bit of text according to the syte's definition. For instance: use a monospace typeface, apply some margins to this paragraph and paint a gray background on it.
Likewise, I should be able to update the style definition and all code blocks should update accordingly.
This is very basic functionality that has existed in word processors since... forever. Large and/or more complex documents are simply much much more painful to maintain/evolve without this feature.
To add on to your well laid out points, many companies have "house styles" embedded into their templates that allow a consistent look and feel. GDocs lack of support for these makes it a non-starter.
gsheets lets me collaborate with others in real-time and share with others very easily. When you think about “performance”, you have to consider more than just the immediate steps taken while in the application. If you think about the entire end-to-end experience, gdrive is so much faster and seamless.
office 365 offers "co-authoring" and easy sharing as well. You're talking about something excel already has.
But working on large files is ridiculously painful. It's just not as as good as a native app. I don't want to give up my ability to work on large files in a performant fashion, which I do all the time, in exchange for collaboration support I do occasionally but a worse overall experience and frustrating lag compared to a native application.
Excel formulas have a horrible 1970:ish syntax. Reminds me of BASIC programming. But typically I get the job done, sometimes after several awkward intermediate steps.
I wasn't aware that Google has a different one. I have never used more than simple sums and differences in Google sheets. Can you give an example where Google offers better, incompatible functionality?
For example, QUERY [1], SPLIT [2] and ARRAYFORMULA [3] are the ones that comes to mind. To be fair MS Excel can do arrayformulas, but I prefer GSheet's syntax. Last time I tried Excel, TRANSPOSE wasn't a thing it but it seems to be there now.
I periodically check on LibreOffice to see if it's usable and typically I don't last more than a minute or two without hitting a major show-stopper. Last time I tried LibreOffice Writer, the text didn't render until after I stopped typing. The time before that, LibreOffice Calc took 3 seconds to begin editing any cell.
It's a common problem with Open Source: who does the slog work of testing, tracking down, and fixing the simple bugs and perf issues? Evidently, LibreOffice doesn't have enough maintainer cycles to have good coverage of common setups. It's unfortunate and as a developer I feel for them, but as a user it makes paying Microsoft an easy choice.
The original comment was about the design space, and I have to agree: Inkscape is stuck behind. Figma is a very high quality product, actually fewer bugs or issues than its offline counterparts.
I really think that the future is Local-First software and FOSS can greatly benefit from the new paradigm [1]. With Local-First software the cloud is just the natural extension for backup and collaboration (real-time or offline) not the sole repository for the data.
[1]Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud:
The concept looks fine, but was there resistance from users to have local apps talk to cloud resources in the first place ? It looks to me like it’s just describing the situation from a few years ago, but as a pre-packaged concept.
I understand the current situation as a result from evolving business models, that lead to better profits when the control is taken away from the user and they have to get into subscriptions for continuous use. Basically the Adobe CS story. This manifesto doesn’t touch the business aspect at all, so I’m not sure what to take from it.
Coincidentally, currently there are ongoing discussions on how to utilize Git outside of the software engineering field.
In particular, this is small anecdotal case study on how a calendar booking/rental system can work with Git [1]. For me this is a wonderful example of application for Local-First software albeit a simple one.
[1]Ask HN: Why hasn't Git been adopted outside of software engineering?
Once you have your centralized cloud service integrated, you have ongoing support costs so you must charge subscription instead of letting your users fully own the software. The only acceptable paradigm in my view is local-first with P2P collaboration options.
I don't agree that this thing about moving to the browser is currently relevant outside of the drawing software like figma and equivalents. I don't see NLE, 3D suites, DAWs and many more moving anytime soon to the browser. Maybe photo editors like photoshop? But even that isn't there yet.
And to be honest the only FOSS content creation software that actually competes at the professional level (i.e not just simple edits) with proprietary tools is Blender: As in, would people use this software, if all the (currently proprietary) alternatives were also FOSS? But inkscape doesn't need to compete. So I don't think it's getting left behind in the dust.
I'm sure too that most inkscape users would much rather have a lot other improvements, than moving to the web.
I would still use inkscape, it's way faster and lighter and though it crashes sometimes, it doesn't corrupt files like Illustrator. It also has (IMO) a simpler interface that's somewhat more discoverable than Illustrator but not by much.
Yep, exactly. It's absolutely insane we've now reached for a point where when people see a standalone, working, polished piece of software that respects your freedom, they somehow feel that it is "inferior" because it doesn't take away your rights.
I, for one, am glad that Free/Libre software like inkscape continues to be heading strong, and find that it far outpaces any of the proprietary malware SAAS applications out there.
It's not insane. People want to know whether free software package X is a good alternative to the proprietary version. If it isn't, the fact that it's "good enough on its merits" is irrelevant. If they don't think proprietary software is intrinsically evil, then the free/proprietary distinction is irrelevant to them too.
In what way do you find Inkscape to outpace e.g. Figma? That would be interesting to hear.
The free/proprietary distinction is only irrelevant for small-ish projects, on the order of a few months, where "good" is a one-dimensional measure in terms of features the application has: The risk of the software maintaining company being bankrupt in this timespan is low.
A typical mid-level employee at a company might be very happy with such tools, especially because they are usually new & shiny too.
Now imagine you are part of a team that wants to solve BIG problem, over a LONG timescale.
Suddenly the picture becomes more nuanced as software features aren't the only thing that matters anymore.
Would you really want to make the success of your project dependent on a third-party software company whose objectives aren't aligned with yours and that can take the tools you use away from you on a whim?
FOSS makes a very strong point there. The interface may not make you cry and melt your eyes with shiny buttons, but you can be sure that years down the road the software will still be there and you can read your old files no matter what, as the file formats are open. You can depend on the software, and,.more importantly, you can assess and proactively mitigate the failure modes in advance!
(E.g. the tex files from the 90s that you can find on some researchers website can still be compiled today; I imagine the entire research community would be significantly hindered if they would have to deal with the zoo of formats of proprietary software, rtf, doc, docx etc. In this sense FOSS can even act as the catalyst for establishing a standard, as is the case for tex files in domains of science.)
Though I agree that for image editing specifically, typically projects are probably not longer than you few months, so in this you case I imagine you could go without issues with the flow of new and proprietary software.
If FOSS is responsible for establishing TeX, then I would pay Bill Gates my last $ to embrace, extend and extinguish the entire miserable movement. TeX is a horror from the 1980s that refuses to die.
That's not exactly a FOSS problem, though. Nothing stops an open source project from offering the same collaborative features as proprietary solutions.
It just seems that people who work on FOSS value privacy, ownership and freedom more than braindead ease of use and monetization.
That seems to be an unfair dismissal of these products. The vast majority of everything built with these tools will be public facing. Marketing designs, UI design, etc.
Design is a very collaborative process, especially with remote work which has made having everyone see and edit the same thing at once critical. It's not "braindead" to work in a team, its a requirement. I really want to see FOSS succeed but its hard to see how the open source benefits translate over to this kind of software where you no longer run the software locally and consistency is needed so others have the same version of the tool as you.
Sandstorm.io tries to make collaborative web apps work easily with sharing for non-technical users, though we haven't solved getting people a server easily, or more crucially, convincing people to buy a server to do things they can do for free with ads.
Unfortunately, the problem is companies powered by ad revenue have a lot more money to throw at usability than FOSS folks do.
> we haven't solved getting people a server easily
It doesn't help that Sandstorm focuses on apps that are architected with a devops-heavy mindset. Many apps don't really need anything more complicated than PUT and DELETE (no POST special handling required), esp. since they're already doing so much on the client, anyway. This really calls for an auth-protected document store more than it does what Sandstorm tries to provide; the difficulties of "getting people a server" probably starts with assuming/insisting that that's what you need to do in the first place.
Those kinds of architectures are only necessary when you really do need some way to offload computation to a remote, high-availability machine, but things like online image and document editors aren't that. (Even then, what you really want for that is some sort of mobile code architecture that lets you squirt lightweight payloads at some sort of fleet of faceless workers, preferably in the same/similar form to the kind of code that you write for doing useful work on the client...)
I really don't agree. I think loading a bunch of client-side crud from a random web server and storing it in opaque browser buckets is super untrustworthy. I think to some degree modern web app development has gone off the rails a bit.
Why are you moving the goalposts (ignoring the premise)? Sandstorm apps (like e.g. Etherpad, advertised right on the front page) aren't already doing lots of client-side work (locally), like I originally said?
All of these apps and products I mentioned do not have ads, they are paid for directly. Users/businesses do want to pay for software, but when they do pay, they want it to just work seamlessly. No one wants to set up and maintain a server.
I mean, ultimately the answer there is... pay someone to run your open source server for you. But since the OSI hates SSPL and the like, the actual open source developers are disadvantaged in running such a service compared to someone who just downloads it and hosts it.
A huge issue is that the gatekeepers of "open source" don't believe making it financially viable is something they need to address. So it's gonna end up being the best we can do in our spare time for the love of progress.
Do you know Penpot? https://penpot.app
Its like, sketch/figma online, collaborative and open source. Its not at the same level of Figma but its pretty good!
Users are given a choice. There are mountains of alternatives to adobe products. But they keep paying for the adobe one because it’s the best. And it’s the best because people keep paying their monthly subscriptions to fund it.
They might complain but at the end of the day they are very happy to pay adobe for the best in class tools.
The industry keeps paying because of the sunk costs of legacy files and content, and the fact that Adobe also makes RIPs for imagesetters so the expectation is that it will all be compatible and work together.
As a proof of concept about the possibility of a design tool with the potential to share information in this way it's intriguing.
I'll also add that a major pain point of FL/OSS tools for me is that so many of them HEAVILY depend on local file descriptors which makes remote storage access a PITA.
> The design space has been very rapidly moving towards online
I think the opposite will eventually be true, a browser is no space for complex documents.
> Even a lot of the big name proprietary tools are finding themselves becoming rapidly obsolete in a world where people want to IM a link and just have it reflect the latest version rather than attaching files back and forth.
O365 has worked like this for years and it works well.
> The design space has been very rapidly moving towards online, live collaboration tools like Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, etc and FOSS just has no answer for this market.
Some people speculate whether the rise of SaaS is a response to FOSS, which made it difficult to monetise software development. I’ve certainly begun to question my previous automatic assumption that FOSS is a good thing in the long term.
The good news for FOSS is that hosting costs just keep getting cheaper, so providing free SaaS is increasingly feasible.
There’s also the “third way” of FOSS with a hosted option available. Wordpress is a good example of that. If deploying such projects on the cloud eventually becomes trivial, then you could imagine a FOSS desktop in the future might have a cloud component (or be entirely remotely hosted). That might sound odd, but consider you still need to buy hardware to run your FOSS on, so renting that hardware instead isn’t a great leap.
Wordpress is an example of that for the simple reason that it is a CMS, which by its very nature implies it works in a server-client fashion. Of course Wordpress can be run as SaaS or self-hosted–it is software that needs to be hosted to serve its purpose.
On the other hand, editing vector graphics has no intrinsic need to be hosted. Just because a cloud-based FOSS desktop in the future could be imagined doesn't make it a reasonable idea. What would be the point, other than massively increasing complexity and points of failure in terms of reliability and security?
Lots of points, but the most obvious one is with SaaS you can deploy a single version of software, which makes it orders off magnitude less difficult to maintain.
I don't understand that argument. I sometimes use Inkscape but I never have more than a single version deployed on my device. Also, I don't think I'm putting any pressure on the maintainers if I were to insist on never updating from an older version.
Snarkiness aside, being able to "deploy a single version of software" is itself incompatible with the ability to self-host, making it a moot point for FOSS (let alone for FOSS that has no practical reason to be SaaS in the first place).
Until you have users that want a feature in an older version that's not in a newer one. Oh, and companies are always saying "nobody uses feature X, it was hard to maintain so we got rid of it" which is infuriating if you're a user of feature X.
Good employees find ways to collaborate no matter what. That’s to say that real-time collaboration is a luxury feature. Also, many projects have only one designer. Not to mention, it’s rare to find designers that work in tandem.
Also, from a dev perspective having designs updates without some process is undesirable.
As a different point of view, I work w/ my designer in Figma, and the collab features are a must-have. Our iterations are much faster in Figma than they would be on static files shipped via PDF, or whatever it would be.
I've worked with designers in tandem as well, sharing screen, sitting next to each other, and in online real-time. Real-time collaboration is a way to collaborate, not the only way.
Knowing how to collaborate well with LaTeX makes you about as "good" an employee as knowing how to collaborate well with Inkscape.
The point is that even in places where about half the employees know how to collaborate with these tools, it is not done because you need the other employees to function.
I meant good as in good faith, but I see your point. I started using Corel Draw ~97, and after trying many design programs of all them seem about the same complexity-wise.
Now, many people tried Gimp (which is far from Photoshop) and they wrongly think that Inkscape is another Gimp.
I have never used photoshop and I still feel unsatisfied with GIMP. I have a long list of thoughts but the simplest one was the fact that moving/rotating/scaling a layer is 3 different tools. I was told a long time ago that there was work to merge them, years later the change comes out and it just groups the tools under one icon so you now have to right click first to select the tool you want. It's pretty much broken on a 4k display as well.
I do like gimp as a bit of a Swiss army knife program, it can do a lot of utility jobs like resizing, outlining, etc which can be hard in some of the more intuitive modern apps, but most of my work now is done on an app like Procreate and then I'll move to gimp for the final edits.
Gimp certainly has its GUI problems - coming back to it after using Darktable has been quite painful. I can accept it has GUI issues. However, for what it does, the only tool that is better is Photoshop. Sure, Lightroom/Darktable has a lot of nifty convenient stuff with a better GUI, but they're simply not a viable replacement for Gimp.
There are other photo editing tools with better UI, but poorer features, sadly. It would take a ton of work to catch up in terms of features.
> I have a long list of thoughts but the simplest one was the fact that moving/rotating/scaling a layer is 3 different tools.
You might find that fact to be on the ageing side :) Unified Transform tool has been available for many years now. It's all three (and more) tools in one.
If anything Gimp is too much like Photoshop. Corel Photo-paint has a much more powerful paradigm of manipulable bitmap objects rather than shoehorning everything into fixed dimension layers. It's unfortunate it never got any respect and withered.
The point is that few workplaces have a majority of employees that are "good enough" to find ways to collaborate with Inkscape. If even a third of them cannot find a way to do so, you're stuck, and siloing your/their work is not an option. No decent manager would accept that merely because you insist on using Inkscape.
Sure, but once you make the effort required to build a real time app, there are vanishingly few reasons why not to have it as a web app. Some of them provide a desktop app as well but they all provide a web app.
As a designer, you can just send a link to your design to anyone, end users, clients, developers, managers. And they just click it and it shows up and works. No need for installing software, setting up accounts, etc. A lot of these web apps are actually C++ and then compiled to web assembly so they are quite fast.
Do you use source control or do you email zips with the source files between you and the other developers? The collaboration here is exactly the same as that distinction in workflows.
It's obviously not just "two clicks", it's "Text copy 2 final final alt reviewed.doc" and then you get a new person email their suggested updates to you as "Text copy 2 final 2.doc" and you have to somehow merge those suggestions in with the head version.
With Word at least there's the ability to do suggestions rather than direct edits to let you collaborate against nonsynced docs at all, but with Inkscape when that happens you'll literally just get a different svg and you can't actually merge at all, instead you'd need to conceptually understand what edits were made and then make them again manually to the "head" version, which is completely redundant work.
This post is about Inkscape and Inkscape svgs dont have any edit history baked into them. If you had a dozen revisions and one of several collaborators sends you a suggestion version which they edited from some unknown revision what would you do with that? The file itself doesn't imply what deltas they made, and "copy paste" doesn't make sense, since what would you even be copy+pasting?
Yes, I honestly think that if you have collaborators doing edits forming a DAG of derived artifacts, and you only observe a subset of those artifacts that you can't take some arbitrary artifact and merge that correctly with another arbitrary that opaquely branched some point in the past. And that is what consistently happens with the "just email some zips of the documents" collaboration flows.
Git helps by forcing the deltas to be knowable, but at the expense of a complex management tool and only really working on text based source. All other modern software now solves this problem by being online collaborative which eliminates the problem entirely, and that benefit dwarfs any other feature for most corporate/organizational usecases.
Inkscape is great software, but it's not acceptable software if you're going to collaborate with multiple other people who will all be making edits to the same document.
Virtually all FOSS projects grind to a halt with regards to basic features as soon as they gain traction. The old userbase wants to keep the UX, others want to revamp, yet others want some other kind of pivot.
The real pivot window is before you gain traction, unfortunately.
This seems accurate. Reminds me of libre office which has a settings page to pick between 5 different toolbar UIs. I have got to the point where I don’t want to be customising my toolbar. I just want the default one and I want the default one to be the best UI. While the default on LO hasn’t progressed in 20 years.
Do you ever think a project like Blender will end up like this. I don't think there is anything remotely similar to it online and I doubt there ever will be.
I think it will when the web becomes powerful and efficient enough to run such a tool in the browser. I don't think its there yet but I'd expect it will be eventually.
I'm not talking about low level infrastructure, but the user facing software. Offline desktop tools have rapidly started to become obsolete. Products like Office had to scramble to pivot because Google Docs was replacing them. Its been a while now since I have been emailed an actual office file instead of being sent a link to the live version.
A while ago it was common for Photoshop or illustrator to be used for UI designs and then it would be thrown over the wall to you as a PNG which you had to make sure you had the latest version of. These days everywhere I have worked has used a tool like Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, and gives out a link which is always up to date, which you can fiddle with, write comments on, etc.
The market is rapidly shifting and I'm just not sure how FOSS is going to stay relevant in this space.
> The market is rapidly shifting and I'm just not sure how FOSS is going to stay relevant in this space.
How realistic is it to expect FOSS tools to directly compete head-to-head with these incredibly well-funded privately owned tools? The whole point of these companies is to solve the "hard" problems in order to gain a functional and competitive advantage in the market. FOSS OTOH deals with table scraps in terms of funding and technical talent. And let's face it, who are some of the biggest contributors to open source? These very same companies. They're happy to help keep the specific libs that matter to them up to date, but they're certainly not going to give away the entire product for free.
> Offline desktop tools have rapidly started to become obsolete. Products like Office had to scramble to pivot because Google Docs was replacing them. Its been a while now since I have been emailed an actual office file instead of being sent a link to the live version.
Just because the market moves in a particular direction doesn't mean it's the right decision for end users, all it means is that it's the right decision for the business. Take the mobile phone manufacturers removing the headphone jack. No customers asked for that, it was purely a move to drive sales of bluetooth peripherals.
There may come a time when running software locally becomes in-vogue again, who knows? It's companies that get to dictate the platforms because they own them. And as others have pointed out, it's not like these online collab tools aren't without their own issues. I guess I just don't understand why people think that FOSS can deliver polished end-user products on the scale that companies do.
Why can't FOSS do this, though? There's no reason Inkscape couldn't work the same way, where a document lives in the cloud and users pass around links to it.
It does require someone to maintain and pay for the cloud hosting. That shouldn't be unsolvable; that's not really any fundamentally different than hosting a download site for traditional FOSS. Donation-supported FOSS can work.
1. A generic CRDT library, preferably in C or something that exposes a C interface. This is probably very hard or even impossible, depending on how much must be abstracted and how much work the developer must do to express edits in terms of the CRDT.
2. A P2P backend for said library for streaming edits.
3. A networked data store, maybe as-a-service, for versioning and persistence.
2 and 3 might even be made transparent to non-CRDT-aware applications through FUSE, but that's not a hard requirement.
If the software you use is decently priced and does what you need then fine. I'm sure that support is fine too.
When I call for help in say Krita or Samba on the mailing lists, I often get the actual programmers responding. Not all the time but quite often.
I've been running an IT company for 22 years. I have a fair idea about what the market is up to. It turns out that a wanky LDAP n Kerberos combo will still be available next year, as it has for the last ... (when did Windows NT domains morph into AD? What a bloody nonsense)
I am a daily user of Inkscape and I love this software. Thank you for that version, snapping and multiple pages are incredibly helpful. Earlier in the day, I was about to download a suspicious add-on to batch export images, what a pleasure to find this option in this new version!
Inkscape definitely needs an UX refresh like Blender had one. It's very hard to pick up, lots of weird/arcane behavior that doesn't match other tools in the space.
It's only weird if you learn Illustrator first. For me it was extremely intuitive, and at this point the shortcuts are muscle memory. I taught it to 10 year olds for 3 years.
But... you want people to use the software you make as a developer, I assume? In the same way that Blender provides an input mode for Maya users, Inkscape could provide input modes for Illustrator users.
FOSS is supposed to serve people, if your system can easily accommodate that, I see absolutely no reason not to other than some ideological desire to be different.
If someone that has been using Illustrator for years tries Inkscape and goes "Why the hell would it work like that, that's insane", then gives up, that doesn't serve that user nor FOSS, and they go back to paying Adobe.
There's a keyboard shortcut configuration for Illustrator users. Modifiers too, I hear the difference between ctrl and shift really hurts moving between programs.
Absolutely hard NO on that. I use inkscape almost every single day, and most of the buttons and tools are just pure muscle memory for me.
I genuinely do not understand this idea of doing "UX[sic] refreshes" on productivity software. Do people do design refreshes on hammers and screwdrivers?
"I want all my software to work in the same way, even if there are problems with the way it all works. I don't want developers to think about things and come up with new and potentially better ways, because then I have to learn stuff. Just make everything work the same, and I'll be happy, fast and productive."
Inkscape is an absolutely divine software. I use it almost every single day.
I have a copy of illustrator as well (which I pay for), but it mostly serves to export things to something inkscape is happy with, or for helping me identify fonts.
Inkscape blows it out of the water with its UI. Illustrator is confusing and it seems like everything useful is hidden behind a few layers of menus. I hate it.
Haven’t downloaded this release yet, but as a longtime user of Inkscape the ability to add and manage pages sounds like an amazing addition to the application. Previously, I would approximate managing multiple pages by hiding and showing layers, then exporting each page manually. Needless to say, I am excited to leave that workflow behind!
Another cool thing that was on the betas is that the export dialog has a 'batch' tab, where you can export all or a selection of the pages or layers in your document.
Not sure about Illustrator files, but I just tested out opening a multi-page pdf, and I was given the option to import “All” the pages, which worked perfectly. Very exciting!
I never got the need for pages in a vector graphics tool. Why do vector images need a page? Do people print them?
The whole point for me is that the vector image scales. Mostly there is no pre-defined size. So the page dimensions are meaningless. Why would you want multiple of those?
I make slides on Inkscape and until now had to resort to clunky solutions to generate multipage PDF files.
> Do people print them?
Yes. People print PDFs.
> Mostly there is no pre-defined size. So the page dimensions are meaningless.
That’s not true if, for example, you need to render vector graphics on a screen. Since it’s physically impossible to show the entire Cartesian plane, you need to constrain it somehow.
Interesting, that sounds more like what people used to use desktop publishing software for. Is Inkscape even the right tool for that job? Doesn't sound like it's the core use case for it at least. But cool that it can do it. I'm obviously not a designer or a hard core user of any vector graphics tools. Frankly, Inkscape is a bit intimidating to me.
What I would expect is that you design maybe to have your graphics fit some area (box, circle, whatever), then you save, and then when you use the graphics (on a web page, in a presentation, etc.), you scale it to whatever desired dimensions. While you are editing, you zoom in and out as needed.
Screens are a good example actually. They have different dimensions, pixel densities, aspect ratios, etc. So web design tends to use relative units (em, rem, px, etc.). Also, is a screen a page? Or just a rectangle with some aspect ratio.
Take icons for example. Which is probably a core use case for Inkscape. You'd design some logo to fit square dimensions. And then you'd export bitmaps in various pixel sizes. Does that square have any meaningful dimensions? IMHO it doesn't. Certainly almost never actual paper sizes.
What baffles me as a rather casual user is that when I need to do some vector work for an icon (typically) and the first thing I'm confronted with is paper dimensions.
As a mostly web/app programmer Inkscape is a great tool to do minor alterations to icons, logos etc.
Change an icon to use fills instead of strokes? No problem. Change colours? No problem. Align the image in the middle of viewport? Remove excessive spacing? Make icons from different sources the same size? Grab a logo from a PDF? No problem.
Though my days as an aspiring graphics designer are long past, I would think that Inkscape is also a good tool for creating logos and icons. The node editor really is quite good.
For web/app design there are a lot of shortcomings though. There's no dynamic snapping, filters on groups (e.g. drop shadows), reusable components. The text editor is also very basic and counter-intuitive.
> For web/app design there are a lot of shortcomings though. There's no dynamic snapping,
what do you mean by dynamic snapping. Inkscape had snap to objects, corners, grids ... since forever. Is there anything else to dynamic snapping?
> filters on groups (e.g. drop shadows),
I think there were multiple extensions that could do e.g. drop shadows on groups when I looked at doing that several years ago.
> The text editor is also very basic and counter-intuitive.
I agree text handling isn't great, especially exported text paragraphs still sometimes cause issues (they essentially don't show up in exported PDFs). That said I'm not sure what you mean by the text editor is basic, sure it's not a word processor, but other programs in this space have very similar editors.
> what do you mean by dynamic snapping. Inkscape had snap to objects, corners, grids ... since forever. Is there anything else to dynamic snapping?
Luckily it appears that it has actually been implemented in this new version. It's the feature called "Alignment and Distribution snapping".
> I think there were multiple extensions that could do e.g. drop shadows on groups when I looked at doing that several years ago.
While that's nice and all, I think it should be built-in functionality, with the same level of stability and user friendliness as the rest of the application.
Usually I make the final document in scribus, once text blocks with more than one line are involved. Similar to how AI users reach out for ID when it gets text-heavy, I guess.
I'm a dev and I'm pretty comfortable with gimp and raster editors but I haven't spent enough time with inkscape or other vector editors yet.
Anyone have some inkscape-specific links or resources to share on best practices and workflows? E.g. using layers, creating custom shapes, mirroring curves, exact measurements, etc...
They do use cairo for rendering to a CGContext via cairo_quartz_surface_t which has traditionally not been all that great on macOS. Additionally they're dealing with colorspace transforms on more recent macOS along with some bugs in macOS that were causing non-native applications to do considerable damage/redraws.
If/when Inkscape moves to GTK 4, a lot of this will just go away. The new macOS backend (which I wrote) is considerably faster and defaults to using the OpenGL renderer (which I also write a large portion of) but is also considerably faster when using Cairo by removing Quartz/CGContext from the equation and using Pixman directly with IOSurface.
When using OpenGL, however, we have to emulate something like eglSwapBuffersWithDamage() to keep the compositor from over-compositing, but that was done with tessellation just fine.
Maybe if someone comes along to write one or we get a multi-backend shader compiler so it doesn't explode the number of shaders we have to write and optimize.
But honestly, it doesn't matter. Apple just shipped a new OpenGL for M systems and every major browser is using GL more than ever. It's not going anywhere. And even if it did, we have a Vulkan backend that can target MoltenVK as well as Mesa's Zink already supporting at least OpenGL 4.6 which could also be run on MoltenVK with very little overhead.
Mac's generally have a HiDPI screen so they shouldn't be affected by the issue you're parroting.
That said, I already wrote GLyphy integration for GTK 4 and it may land before 4.8. It can significantly improve font rendering quality by drawing the glyphs on the GPU rather than from CPU drawings uploaded into an atlas which is pixel boundary bound.
It's very unclear to me wether hidpi makes the non-subpixel rendering bearable or wether the rendering would still be better if it exploited subpixel antialiasing on 4K, it's just that the perceived difference is smaller and good enough.
I don't know.
When I criticised this on twitter one of devs started replying and getting upset at me. He couldn’t understand that I don’t want to use a piece of software that runs at 5fps
> He claimed to me that Mac is not a supported target of Inkscape
Unless I see a direct quote, I'm likely to suspect that what he actually said was along the lines of "We do not have developers using macOS, so we barely support that platform. Would you like to help us?".
> ...and then blocked me
I don't really know you at all, but I know Martin a little. He can take a punch, so blocking someone means he had serious reasons to be annoyed. OTOH, I'd rather not take sides here, that's between you and him.
Why does it see so hard for FOSS to design a good looking UI. I honestly struggle visually with distinguishing what all those symbols mean. I don't use inkscape enough to memorise keyboard shortcuts. I'm sure an experienced user will come along and proclaim it just works, but as someone who wants to use it intermittently, it needs some serious refinement.
This makes me chuckle a little because Inkscape is the refinement! There used to be windows all over the place when it was still sodipodi.
My understanding is that in this particular case, it's built in a very modular way. E.g. it uses an embedded version of potrace to do autotracing. It's hard to make a good and consistent UI when you're unifying so many pieces.
Generally these 'archaic' desktop apps have much better UIs than all the flat mobile-focused UIs that are popular these days with their oodles of wasted screen space, messy menus and unnecessary extra clicks needed for basic operations.
Why do you think that is? What makes them popular?
Figma, canva etc are all really popular. Google docs is popular. They are all easy to use. For basic tasks we really dont need a huge expanse of menus and options all laid out like an aircraft cockpit. I would argue for a normal person that is far worse than some empty screen, which maybe hides a bit, but puts the more common or important tools visually first.
Maybe it could just be a toggle in a menu somewhere, "pro mode". These FOSS tools could learn what was good about modern design and try to iterate on the good take aways.
A bit like the meta discussion, salty is current term in society unlike GIMP and Inkscape UI.
I have a concrete questions:
Why can’t a lot of FOSS projects try and distill what is good about modern UI or ideas instead of looking like a program from 10 years ago.
What is the obstruction in the community getting people to work on this? Hostile power user attitudes?
Simultaneously if free software advocates want it to be adopted why don’t they cater a bit to the good things about modern design?
Saltily remarking “you get what you pay for”, is hostile. Fine I’ll use the modern web and tools, and they can lament on HN wondering where everyone went.
The problem is foxes, Inkscape does try and distil what is good about modern UI. The critique doesn't fit because it ignores the very real and material efforts in Inkscape's UX team to do exactly what you are saying.
And the improvements in this release reflect a lot of that work.
The point was, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone is paying one way or the other. Comparing a few volunteers to trillion dollar organizations or VC projects is a little silly, is it not?
Not to mention "modern design" is often worse in a number of ways.
Inkscape is an incredible achievement with the amount of resources it has had available. If you can do better, do so. I'm willing to bet a comparable program is 1000x more work than you anticipate.
Maybe we have different salt. In my regional vernacular, "salty" means something you did or didn't do is making you look like a fool.
This is usually accompanied by someone eagerly pointing out "Don't you feel salty!"
I've seen that use rising among cryptobros lately, specifically to deflect critics as secretly jealous that they missed out on something. I'll allow it as long as they don't co-opt jawn as well.
trying to sassily point out that you shouldn't critique free software sounds salty to me
imean i really like inkscape but it seems obvious to me that being able to organize a focused, coherent, and powerful interface is a rare and subtle skill, and most people with it would not also happen to find themselves successfully herding the cats required for effective implementation in an OSS project
Complaining a program doesn't fit your use case (with a modern coat of paint to boot) is not really constructive criticism. Notably without specific solutions. In fact comes across as entitled.
Sure it can be improved, but dumbed-down and flat is not in the top 100 things I'd ask for.
I was using Scribus for multi page documents but, as a fully fledged DTP solution, it is often overkill, I'm glad I can now use Inkscape for smaller jobs, thanks to the new Page tool.
Inkscape is truly the Swiss Army knife of the open source graphics ecosystem, I use it more often than any other application.
Yes, totally agree. The somewhat dated Scribus UI can be quite non-intuitive unless one uses it regularly and takes the time to learn how to work around its quirks.
I will be very happy if one day I open up Inkscape and I'm not presented with a virtual sheet of paper as my starting point. I find it extraordinarily off putting to have to pretend I'm going to print out the end result.
Is your objection just that the default canvas size is A4 paper instead of let's say 1080p? Or is it that the canvas is finite at all?
Despite being "infinitely" scalable, SVGs still have a "native" scale and coordinste system, so it would be far more disorienting and error-prone to present the user with a blank infinite canvas instead. The default being paper size is a bit unusual since Inkscape isn't very suitable for print work (color spaces and all that), but these days you can pick a starting size in the launcher anyway, so most of the time when starting new projects you don't even see thr default.
What is your objection, specifically? Is it that canvases are finite? That the default finite size is a paper size? That the background is white? Something else?
I have a lot of complaints about inkscape, but this wasn't one of them.
When I researched it last time, Inkscape was the only reasonable way to do programmatically edit arbitrary SVGs. Other tools always had some troubles with some weird edge-cases, Inkscape knew how to edit everything I threw at it. Including really weird CSS inside SVG.
It was pretty annoying that I needed to install all the graphical layers in Docker just to do that, but hey, it worked.
It also doesn't look atrocious on Mac anymore, that's great.
That being said, I am still not used to the "corel draw-like" UX, I prefer the "illustrator" UX. So with that said I prefer Affinity tools.
Big, big fan of Inkscape. The latest release was horribly broken on my M1 Mac (every keyboard shortcut didn’t need the modifier so typing a Z was Undo, etc) I’ll download this and try it out.
I have a lot of respect for Inkscape (the fact of its existence and ongoing development). I used it to make the main logo/home link on my personal site and for some freelance work, partly because I wanted to see how it had progressed, partly because I was between jobs and found it unreasonable to budget a commercial tool license.
I’ll be … gentle in my criticism but, I found Inkscape hard to use. I eventually found my way to do what I needed to do. But it was like relearning Adobe tools with subtly different confusions almost every step of the way. If I recall, it’s structurally very close to 1:1 with the SVG output. Which might be what users want! It might even produce better SVGs. But I found myself thinking “can I bail out to the text editor like I’m using an HTML WYSIWYG?” fairly often.
I’m sure if I used it more and got more familiar I’d know or develop instincts for where to look for … everything. But if Inkscape devs are here and want (I promise, this is intended as constructive) feedback, the learning curve was pretty steep for me.
Ditto. Every time I try to prep a cut design with Inkscape, I get mired up the distinction (internally) or lack thereof (visually) between lines, paths, objects, strokes, and whatever other internal representations may exist.
Some of these things render fine on the display, and cut just fine with the inkcut extension. Some render but do not cut. Some things get cut multiple times, which causes the knife to overpenetrate and destroy the backing. And for years of attempts, I can't seem to understand the distinction, or how to discern what my drawing actually consists of.
Inkscape must be good for something; a lot of people seem to care about it. And it looks pretty neat. But either I'm missing a fundamental concept, or it's just not good for what I want to do with it.
> And for years of attempts, I can't seem to understand the distinction, or how to discern what my drawing actually consists of.
If you look at the status bar at the bottom of the window, it always tells you the type(s) of the object(s) you have selected on your screen. So you can quickly tell whether something is a path, or an object, or a text, or whatever. There's also outline mode which hides your stroke and fill styles, so you only see the paths. Paths are what my laser cutter will follow, completely ignoring those stroke widths or fill colors or what have you, so outline view shows exactly what it will cut.
Inkscape is sometimes my goto for this kind of work, but I've _always_ had really weird performance issues with it with even really basic stuff across many different machines/OSes over the years. Hopeful those performance improvements will affect whatever I've been doing.
Looks great! Glad to see the gradients are more intuitive again. I think the UX can be a bit tighter since it still takes a lot of space on laptops. Less spacing perhaps.
Anyway, I love Inkscape, and it is my go-to software for any vector graphic needs.
Probably the biggest difference is that Designer is a combo of a raster and a vector editor, while Inkscape is a pure vector editor. Also Affinity suite supports more color spaces, like CMYK for print stuff. Affinity apps are also very well optimized for Mac and M1, while Inkscape I hear is not.
But there’s probably many reasons against choosing Designer over Inkscape too.
There is a feature count/learning curve price for this, I will readily admit. Sometimes, untenably so. My claim is simply that FOSS tools are important as a backstop/foundation.
I feel that any problem solved exclusively by proprietary software is only solved temporarily and for a tiny percentage of the world population. If the company goes away or the IP otherwise becomes inactive, that's it. Especially with cloud software. With FOSS, the software never really goes away. The problem mostly stays solved, and anyone can resume the work if they are willing and able. I'd imagine a forked FOSS version of Win2k, VB6, or maybe the late-2000s Google indexer (bit of a stretch) would be quite successful today, for example. Guess I'll never be sure of that.
Just musing after a beer and some Red Vines - I welcome any criticism or kindred spirits.