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Inkscape is one of my favorite applications out there. I use it almost daily, both for my day job and hobbies. Thanks Martin!
Thank you!
I’ve been using Inkscape for over 10 years now. I had no idea the man behind it wore a bowler hat and now I will never use another vector program again.
Inkscape is still notably worse to use than Affinity Designer, despite having been started more than ten years earlier. Why?
Because it doesn’t receive the same amount of funding, Genius
I agree with you but one is a for profit product launched by a company with multiples of employees and funding to compete with Adobe.
The other is freeware made by some dude and maybe a few volunteers in their free time out of the goodness of his heart.
You can’t really compare the two.
Right now, there are 79 people on the Inkscape source code project. One would think that 79 people are more than enough to create a good software in 22 years.
it’s probably more important to consider the time vs numbers of people
if 79 people are in a group but only one person has the final say, everything is bottlenecked until the one person acts
are all 79 actually programming? I suspect there’s junior and senior people and probably someone is just watching and learning more than adding
in the business program, it’s probably a team working 40+ hour weeks on a schedule with check-ins and team coherence
old small open source projects are not going to be as polished
are all 79 actually programming?
Are all Serif employees actually programming?
Half of them haven’t been active in 2025, and the first active member i clicked on’s commit history is “fixed a typo on the website” once this year, and once 6 months ago
It’s a shit metric because people spam OSS repos with “minor text fixes” pull requests so they can slap “inkscape contributor” on their CV.
Sure, 79 people who probably aren’t paid who volunteered however many minutes of their free time per week over 22 years vs. 300 full time employees who are salaried and do this day in day out, eight hours a day.
I really do like OSS, but I have to say this train of thought isn’t particularly helpful. Especially in professional and prosumer software that just doesn’t cut it. If the free version is worse, then it’s not the version you want to use. The end reseult ends up being that cheaper but proprietary software like Affinity’s suite or DaVinci Resolve catch up, become dominant and the cycle of enshittification starts anew.
Instead of naively making disingenuous arguments about existing alternatives I’d be more concerned with figuring out ways of getting OSS to keep up with the joneses. I’m often less excited about a solo dev doing “freeway out of the kindness of his heart” and more interested in seeing OSS software gather around a foundation scheme with some corporate sponsors, Blender-style
I’m often less excited about a solo dev doing “freeway out of the kindness of his heart” and more interested in seeing OSS software gather around a foundation scheme with some corporate sponsors, Blender-style
I don’t know much about Blender but if OSS still needs corporate sponsors to stay competitive:
- What’s the point? Might as well become a for profit company themselves then.
- Why would any for profit company sponsor FOSS? They will literally not make profit on it.
Oh, this I like, because I assumed some of this was universally known, but maybe you have to be a bit of a specifically focused nerd.
So for point 1… well, what’s the point of doing the work as an individual? The software that comes out of the other end is still free and open source, so people can still get it freely and modify it however they want. And if you have a successful org you may be able to actually pay and hire devs and grow as a company does without requiring constant growth or prioritizing a sellout.
To question number 2… because having standards is good and you still get a bunch of benefits from free alternatives existing. You’d have to ask the specific corporate sponsors, but it’s pretty clear why Epic would benefit from a free 3D modelling suite people can use to make Unreal Engine content without them having to build and maintain it. Likewise for Nvidia, which will happily sell you the render processing power for your 3D movie project without having to also give you the tools (or share your budget with a paid software alternative). Other sponsors benefit by selling stuff for use with Blender. 3D scanners, plugins, assets… lots of side markets where people can benefit from everbody having access to the toolset. People who sell tutorials. People who make games and have some budget they’d rather spend here than licensing a hundred seats of paid software…
There are tons of tangible benefits from having a powerful, effective open tool for key tasks that aren’t taken advantage of because commerical competitiveness prevents mutual benefit in a bunch of situations. Do you think every artist that is stuck hating Adobe but having to use Photoshop wouldn’t prefer having a free, open alternative to the same quality level? And they’d all be more than capable of financing one with a fraction of the cost of PS, I’m sure. It’s just hard to coordinate and justify that level of support when your benefits aren’t hard revenue pouring in. There are more examples, too. Smart home hardware sellers really DO like Home Assistant providing an inexpensive option for people to plug their devices to without having to pay Google and Apple for the privilege or having to develop an alternative in-house.
The best thing that could happen to open software would be for that pipeline from an obnoxiously overmonized taks with no alternatives to a self-sufficient, non-profit-driven open alternative to get refined and standardized. I have very little belief in one-off devs working for nothing and a lot of hope for organizations capable of paying people for their work without having to endlessly prioritize revenue and growth.
Why you complaining about free stuff tho?
“It’s free” does not mean “it can’t be improved”.
Then improve it yourself or donate, or wait you wont because people like you make nothing but demands
It’s open source have at it
are you helping out or just spreading the hate?
“The software is not good” is not “hate”, my friend.
Inkscape is free and multi-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows). Designer is $20 to $180 and not for Linux, meaning Inkscape has less funds and is more work to maintain.
You have the right to have an opinion. Also, your opinion have zero value for others. No argumentation, no reasons, just : inskape is worse than X.
your opinion have zero value for others
Speak for yourself as it was a valid question from rhabarba.
You have the right to have an opinion.
Well thank you, that’s generous.
Also, your opinion have zero value for others.
Thank you for your valuable opinion about my opinion.
No argumentation, no reasons, just : inskape is worse than X.
Worse to use. The UI is a mess, the application is slow and last time I checked, it crashed more often than not (at least on Windows).
OK, I have information to upvote you. Thanks.
Note: Trolling make other justify their opinions…
on Windows
R.I.P. your credibility re: being the arbiter of good, usable software 🤪
I’m very pleased for you that you always have the choice of which operating system you want to work with in your everyday work and private life. This freedom is a luxury that not everyone has.
The part about the UI is probably substantially down to what you’re used to. I used Inkscape for a long time and recently-ish had to start on Affinity for work, and holy shit Affinity’s UI deserves to be made into a person solely so that we can execute it for its crimes. Because I’m used to Inkscape.
How many of those millions went to his bank account? I’m guessing not many.
he looks happy and his room looks full of fun
that’s worth a million dollars if you ask me
- bowler hat
- window with view of nature
- healthy looking indoor plant
- awesome book collection
- sweater of some medical science organizations he is obviously proud to have worked with.
- intact and healthy conscious (presumably)
This guy is rich as fuck. No wonder the billionaire class is so pissed.
This guy is rich as fuck. No wonder the billionaire class is so pissed.
“Oh no! Another rich person!”
It’s a turn of phrase, not a literal statement.
As far as I know he owns his house and he lives in the UK, so yeah, he’s quite well off if you look at his wealth.
Of course, because no matter how many material goods they possess they’ll never have the happiness of just being a genuenly good person.
I disagree with that framing, someone not buying your shit is not the same as you losing money. Inkscape saved millions for graphic designers, which is very different. Adobe was not entitled to that money, you can’t lose something that was never yours.
Right, it’s akin to saying he stole that money from Adobe the same way the media companies imply that poor people making digital copies of music and movies they wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise is theft.
“I bought a lottery ticket and didn’t win. I lost 50 millions dollars!”
- adobe
Companies talk about lesser earnings as losses all the time.
And they’re wrong all the time
Certainly!
Companies say a lot of things
I worked for a company that made MIDI sequencers. Had been making them for decades before I got there, and still making them long after I left.
One of the first products I worked on, the marketing team decided to put on the box, “World’s first ever MIDI sequencer” 😆
We almost need a new series called, “Companies Say the Darndest Things” that picks up after the original. I’m sure a lot of the kids in the original show are running these companies now.
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Subtle distinction, but actually pretty huge. I agree with you. Companies also use this to say that pirating is stealing, when they never had the business in the first place.
Exactly. I’m pirating because I can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars each month to watch all the movies and shows that I do. If I didn’t have the opportunity to pirate, I still wouldn’t afford it legitimately…
It’s also a great way to demo games and other software if you can afford it before you waste money on something that has no value to you. This is especially useful when you’re on a tight budget.
Just put in your credit card for the 7 day trial! Totally easy to cancel, pinky promise
And the 7-day free trian totally will not become a 2 year subscription which costs more to cancel than keep, and the price will not be 3x the sticker price had you just gotten to the “buy” option. We’re a legit business!
So close.
You should be pirating even if you can afford it because pirating is a tool to help reduce the disparity in wealth.
Uhm. I don’t have a big picture view to claim yay or nay on this one but it seems like if everyone did that we wouldn’t have any entertainment at all. With only small wealth in entertainment, we would only have indie low budget movies and shows, too.
I dunno. It’s a pros and cons situation, for sure.
Yeah. If piracy wasn’t an option, I just wouldn’t play those games.
So many games I have pirated that I have yet to play because there aren’t enough hours in the day and I don’t want to spend them all gaming.
All the money you give these corporations will be used against you someday.
Thank you.
You are right, of course, but I personally draw a great of pleasure from imaging the CEO of Adobe screaming, “CURSE YOU MARTIN OWENS!!!”
I agree. I would never have bought Adobe, I would have not the little bit of vector drawing I have done.
I’m grateful for InkScape, but I wouldn’t have bought or downloaded anything otherwise, so I neither saved nor did Adobe lose.
I had exactly 0 intention of ever buying anything from Adobe.
Inkscape gave me an alternative to the high seas. And it happens to do everything I need it to, although it’s way more powerful than the simple vector graphics conversions I use it for.
10/10, Adobe never lost money from me getting Inkscape. They lost the game before they knew I was a player.
- Inkscape is awesome
- Much like Gimp, Inkscape is not at all a competitor to the adobe suite if you are a professional
- A hobbyist using hobbyist software is not loss of money for The most feature rich professional oriented software out there
I am a Corel kind of bird myself, having used it both professionally (which is how I got started with it) and at home for a couple of decades now. I will say two things about that:
In its current version Inkscape is roughly on par with were CorelDraw was in its 4.0 state or thereabouts (which I still have a copy of, on like seventeen 3.5" floppy disks!) which sounds like damning with faint praise but it really isn’t considering that Inkscape costs nothing to use.
However, one factor that I think most people don’t think about is that Inkscape is currently the best software I’ve ever used, bar none, for ripping apart .pdf documents made by other software, for the purposes of monkeying with their contents. And that’s a ten story tall flaming middle finger to Adobe, and completely obviates the need for 99.9999999% of all users to ever have to pay for the “pro” version of Adobe Acrobat or whatever they’re calling it this week just to be able to made minor adjustments to a .pdf.
Have you tried LibreOffice Draw? I love it for that same reason.
I have, but in general I find Inkscape to be superior overall. The last time I tried the LibreOffice component it did not handle multiple pages very well.
I had no idea Inkscape could work with PDFs like that. Thank you!
Great for text, also. Easy to orientated in any direction… Excellent for quick one-off wiring diagrams.
I’ve always used LibreOffice for that purpose. It’s more familiar if you’re used to office software vs graphics design software.
Just don’t try it with a 60MB+, 200 page+ file.
This is good to know!
You may not know if you exclusively use Corel, but where do you think Corel stands compared to Illustrator these days?
I’m a pro graphic designer, so you can be as technical as you like.
I’ve been messing around with Affinity Designer a bit lately, and while it’s gotten a lot better over the years (and some features have surpassed Adobe), the little things and workflow stuff is still such a step down I find it hard to want to use it still.
I use both Corel and Illustrator for work but I’m very much more “fluent” with Illustrator. I’d say they have a bit different focus. While I hate Adobe with a passion, I’d say Illustrator is a lot better. My co-worker who works with large format printing, likes Corel more.
Appreciate that perspective. I also can’t wait to kick Adobe to the curb someday, but I usually have the same experience when trying alternatives.
Adobe stuff is slowly falling apart though it feels like. It’s coasting on the brilliant work of the original devs pre-creative cloud, and while there have been a few genuinely good features added over the years, I hate to say that most new features they add feel like amateur hour to me. They just lack the level of polish and attention to detail that old features had. It doesn’t feel like the people making it understand the workflow of a professional anymore. They’re also just getting slow. Whenever I open Affinity I’m struck by how much more performant it feels!
Yes, slowly falling apart is a good description. I’m actually thinking of just switching careers. I work in print, so Adobe is pretty much a standard, there are very few viable alternatives.
No idea, unfortunately. I have not touched any of the professional Adobe products in any detail since abandoning Premiere Pro back in probably around 2009. I briefly dabbled with a pirated version of Illustrator when I first got my X1 Yoga and discovered that it did not work correctly with the inbuilt stylus, full stop, and I abandoned it on the spot. I haven’t looked back since.
I did not choose the Corel suite on purpose at the beginning but when I was starting out working professionally it’s what the company worked for used in house, and I’ve stuck with it ever since due to CorelDraw and PhotoPaint doing everything I need and my continued familiarity with it. From what I understand Illustrator is more complex and for that reason some people insist it’s more “powerful,” but I suspect that really just means it’s more byzantine and harder to use. I’ve never not been able to do anything I needed to do with the Corel suite, except:
CorelDraw is to this day useless for editing .pdfs. Which is pretty damn rich for a professional graphics editing suite that costs $400 for a full license. I mean, it can, insofar as the file open and import dialogs will let you choose and load one, but it basically never works right and tends to produce a broken mess. Somehow Inkscape always works for me. So I have a copy of it around on all my machines alongside Corel, for those instances where I need to tweak or extract something from a .pdf and whoever gave it to me won’t provide the source.
I’ve been curious about Corel for a while, so I may need to bite the bullet and get it sometime.
Illustrator is absolutely a byzantine mess lmao. The reason it’s so favored (I don’t want to say loved, but favored) is because of the depth of features, and also how fast it is to work in once you’ve learned it’s bizarre interface.
Some of it is definitely unfamiliarity, but I always find when using Affinity that things that are a single click or a hotkey + click in illustrator are multiple clicks without a hotkey in affinity. In isolation not a huge difference, but when you do it full time it adds up.
Your workflow in the main Corel suite apps is completely customizable. It has a default layout and shortcut configuration as well as a preset that it comes with which allegedly apes Illustrator’s, but you can if you prefer redefine almost everything.
You can choose what tools go in your toolbars, which options show in your drop down menus, where those toolbars are located, and you can even reconfigure the keyboard shortcuts for literally every command, including adding shortcuts to commands which don’t have one by default. I think the only limitation is that they can’t conflict with inbuilt OS hotkeys, e.g. you can’t bind anything to Alt + F4.
You can also perform macros and script the main suite apps using VBA which is only mildly opaque, but opens up the possibility of a world of batch processing tricks if you feel like going down that rabbit hole. I prefer to use Imagemagick for that sort of thing, personally.
This functionality with PDFs is natively built into MacOS. One of the reasons I chose a Mac for my latest PC.
At my old job we used Macs for two reasons: Preview and Outlook on MacOS. I know it sounds silly to people who don’t have to work with email or pdf’s as much as I had to, but it was absolutely the right call for the work we had to do.
Also, depending on your use case it’s crazy how much worse Outlook is on Windows. Local indexing is far worse on Windows, and trying to search a big mailbox brings the app to its knees.
Preview? Am I missing something? I hate that you can even navigate through photos with left right arrows, I never use preview for anything if I can avoid it.
That’s hilarious, because less than 10 years ago Outlook on Mac was so fucking broken that I started a list of the weirdest and funniest bugs at the time.
Also it seems frankly insane to me that people would actively choose a Mac for this reason, and I say that as an M4 owner. But I guess it’s true that for most users the OS barely matters as long as their 2-3 apps and the browser work fine.
Then why do you use this shit software?
It’s even worse with the "new " Outlook, so you might need to look for something else anyway
I fucking loved Corel, I’ve never really found an adequate replacement for it. Guess I’ll be giving InkScape a try, thanks
This guy is a hero. Inkscape is so much better than Adobe. Also, I couldn’t have done some recent PDF to AutoCad conversions without that software. Autocad chokes on pulling vectors out of PDFs for some reason. It does it, but it is a mess. The bad thing is I know it could do better because if you just pull in the same PDF that it struggled with as an external source, it renders it fine, including all the vector information. I could be doing something wrong, but it shouldn’t be that hard.
inkscape is great, I use it all the time
Open source software does not cause a loss of $ it causes everyone else gain.
I like his hat.
Inkscape is a pleasure to use; as powerful as you need, and you can use it with almost no learning curve and add power features as you need them. It’s a wonderfully designed program with a well-thought out UX.
Gimp really could learn a lot about UX design from Inkscape. As much as I like Gimp, while uncommon things are possible but hard, simple things are also possible but hard.
I needed to make a quick cabling diagram for someone, basically just a router to a switch type thing. only took 15 minutes and I don’t use it every day. very user friendly
This is the truth, right here. GIMP’s user interface is an entire F5 tornado’s worth of bullshit and it always has been. I always put it forth as the poster child of precisely how not to do it with any open source productivity software of any stripe and it’s consistently never failed to serve as an example for nigh-on decades.
If the GIMP people would just suck it up and broadly copy the layout of… well, pretty much anything, even MS Paint, it’d be a massive improvement to usability and would probably confer a tenfold increase to the number of users willing to try it out. Or at least stick with it for more than five minutes.
I’m sure it’s a perfectly capable program that’s able to do many things. I just can’t be bothered to put up with it. And this is coming from somebody who willingly uses FreeCAD.
Somehow in the transition from the bunch-of-disparate-floating-toolbar-windows paradigm to the current all-in-one design they’ve managed to make it slightly worse. GIMP’s feature discoverability is basically nonexistent, and the uninitated have no hope of figuring out how to do anything with it other than doodle with the preset brushes without resorting to tutorials.
I can’t believe the dockers (“dockable dialogs”) still take up so much space yet somehow there isn’t room to put title bars on them describing what they do even when you have one of them open and not just tabbed with an inscrutable icon at the top, nor is there any discoverable way to dismiss any of them once you’re done with them because that option is buried in a flyout menu for some reason.
I could go on forever. Don’t get me started.
I am a FOSS nerd for sure but GIMP sucks and it’s awful. I’d rather individually plink pixels into a bitmap manually from the command line with Imagemagick than use GIMP.
Yeah, say what you want, but GIMP developers are brain dead. There are loads of quality OSS apps for creatives: InkScape, Darktable, Blender, etc. And their developers genuinely care about their users. But not GIMP devs, fuck them.
I hear and feel your pain. Gimp is incredibly powerful, and yet I have to look up a tutorial every time I want to just want to draw a square box.
I appreciate him very much, OSS maintainers and devs dont get enough praise. Also I dont get the intense entitlement some people have towards unpaid OSS devs and mainatinerd, they think that they somehow deserve a product equal to that of a corporate offering while not offering any money or code.
It’s because they haven’t thought about it.
They’re so used to the paradigm. I pay money. I get product. I get support.
So when they get the product but they don’t pay money, their brain short circuits and thinks they deserve some kind of support.
In a capitalistic world, communistic projects are confusing. Which is sad.
People equate “cost” with “value”. If something has no cost, it has no value. There’s an old story about computer mice that is apt. An electronics store sells computer mice. Some are expensive, some are cheap. The store has found that one specific mouse is really really reliable. Some of the more expensive mice get constant warranty returns or RMA requests. But not this one mouse. This one mouse is built well, feels good, and works great. Every single desk in the store is using one of these mice. And this specific mouse also happens to be extremely cheap. As in, one of the cheapest that the store carries.
Sales floor employees struggle to sell it, even when they personally use it every day and know it’s a superior product, because customers see the low price and assume it is a low quality product. The customers are directly equating cost with value. And so the store manager does something sort of backwards. They increase the price of the mouse, to be around the same price as the others. Suddenly, this specific mouse is flying off of the shelves. People are now seeing the high price, and assuming that means the mouse is good.
Another place you experience this is when helping your family with tech support. Every single IT worker has experienced the “you updated Chrome on my computer six months ago, and now it’s broken. You broke my computer” complaint from a tech-illiterate relative. They see a friend or relative with a computer issue, they know how to solve said issue, they try to be helpful, and it blows back on them when the computer breaks in the distant future. This is largely because the IT person didn’t charge said friend or family member for their services.
In grandma’s eyes, your tech support service were free, so it has no value. You can’t be trusted as a real IT person, because your services are free. Charging a small “friends and family discount” type of thing actually cements in their mind that you do this for a living. You literally do this professionally. Even if you’re only charging them $5 for an hour of work, when you normally get paid $50 per hour. Again, you can call it the friends and family discount if you need to. But by charging them something, all of those “you broke my computer” complaints suddenly dry up. Because now you’re not just the grandson who plays with computers; you’re a professional in a specialized trade. You know what you’re doing, so it couldn’t have been your fault that the computer broke. It’s not really a friends and family discount; it’s a “stop blaming me when you download viruses” fee.
Bingo! I doubled the amount of business I was doing with my side-hustle PC repair by doubling my price. Also, my customers weren’t such a pain in the ass.
