None of what you're asserting is true of Inkscape. I've been using it for 10 years and while the UI/UX isn't familiar, there's nothing wrong with it. It isn't chock full of bugs or "edge case" (whatever the hell that means) and like all UI/UX it has rough edges AND that's no different from any other sufficiently complex Application.

Does it follow Adobe's UI/UX paradigm? No. Is that bad? No. If you started out using an Adobe competitor in the 90s then you might be familiar with alternatives, that's where I started and I can't stand the UI/UX in Adobe products to this day.

BUT, in general, UX and interaction design simply is not a reductionist process the way implementing functional requirements is. It is an inherently holistic endeavor, an art more than a science, and that is why it helps tremendously to have a single competent person in charge who has a vision of how things should work.

I understand that to the typical programmer mindset it is frustrating when people come and complain that the UI is clunky and unintuitive without being able to express their frustration as a list of actionable "this does A but it should do B" tickets. But that's just how it works! Understanding and empathizing with the users simply requires a different skillset than programming.

That's how software goes, it's a conglomeration of all the features for all of it's myriad of uses. What would benefit one use case might be detrimental for another, and no one UI/UX developer is going to be able to fathom all of those different use cases or conceptualize a UI that's ideally suited for them all.

What you do often get with dedicated resources is a direction drive and clarity of vision that is not in line with what everyone wants and their UI/UX ends up driving people away.

I don't use half of what Inkscape has to offer and I use Inkscape for two very distinct and very different use cases. And for both of those use cases Inkscape is far and away the best piece of software.

For web development, Inkscape is my go to SVG editor. I don't use it as a vector drawing tool at all, if the drawing and filter capabilities went away it wouldn't matter much to me. But the ability to quickly manipulate canvas sizes, add and remove objects, and tweak paths is essential.

When I use Inkscape as part of a CAD/CAM solution engraving, the use case and what UI/UX elements are important is completely different than when I'm optimizing SVG Assets for the web. Certain UI/UX elements I require as a web developer could vanish and I wouldn't care as a CNC operator.

I'm reasonably certain that much of what I value in Inkscape isn't of much use to someone who is producing vector art.

Instead they grow organically over time and are a reflection not just how things are implemented but also of when they were implemented.

The blender 2.50 release was awful for me, since it broke so many of my workflows, but the UI absolutely needed a revamp, and I have incredible respect for the team throwing so much away to make something better.

I wish more open source software would delete more things in order to provide a better or more thought out user experience.

I’ll also note that telling users that their sub-par user experience doesn’t mean that the application has bad UX is foolish. That’s what user experience is. And it’s not a unique position; look at the comments here. The number one complaint is UX. These people ARE the users. I can’t imagine more direct feedback than that.

[edit: changed 1.8 to 2.8]

2.49 was the last one with the really inscrutable old UI, 2.5 was a big overhaul but still had a lot of basic functionality buried behind hotkeys or menus, and 2.8 is the relatively recent one with a lot of that basic functionality exposed.

I don't follow the blender development process too closely, but I think Blender Guru's videos kicked off a lot of the 2.8 design work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk

Along with lots of discussion elsewhere as the actual redesign was underway https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-2-8-user-interface-des...

But did you had it with inkscape?

Also, what was the issue with libreoffice that blocked you from completing your work?

Because, I can imagine many issues with libreoffice, but mainly with microsoft office documents, importing them etc. but experienced no issues with the actual program - except it is horrible from a designers point of view, but I also despise microsoft office. So if I had to designe a page, I usually used - Inkscape. Which I like a lot more than Illustrator.

- TOC links that stopped working

- TOC items that disappeared

- Inconsistent alignment (where the same style would be off by a few pixels on different pages)

- Inconsistent page headers (where some elements would not show, depending on how many pages you have)

- Scripting that yields different visual results each time you run it (this is where I gave up)

- Disappearing cells

- Mysterious blank pages that you can't delete without breaking everything else using the same page style

- Inconsistent results when printing (what you print is not what the document shows)

This is using purely native document formats, not cross-format. Just before giving up, I downloaded the source code to see what was breaking (in the scripting). And then I understood.

I can't remember what issues I had with Inkscape since it was awhile ago. I only remember being aggravated enough to invest time in learning a replacement tool and redoing all my work.

Gimp has tons of UI bugs as well (rectangle select gets stuck in subtract mode, for example), but so far nothing quite bad enough that it can't be fixed by saving, restarting, reloading.

Ah yeah, I remember, this is why I stopped digging more into it, after weird starting results.

And I remembered my main issue with inkscape: text editing. I would actually consider it broken beyond repair at the current state. Which is sad, as otherwise I am really happy with inkscape.

But I also very clearly remember the statement from the main dev from inkscape, when people ask him, if the next version of inkscape could have feature xyz:

he then just replies with a one liner, his bank account number.

The main problem with your story is that there is no "main dev from inkscape". There's a rag tag group of fairly junior developers and amazing support volunteers.

But, I could see how the story could get twisted over time. I'm pretty sure I've never shared my bank account details and I'm the worst bastard at Inkscape for asking users to contribute, all users, in any way they can. This is because contributions are lifeblood, not users. Adobe is great because 90% of their users are contributors where as 0.01% of Inkscape users ever contribute.

So consider contributing your passion about Inkscape at chat.inkscape.org there's a ux team and everything.

I did not follow development of inkcape and the message I mean, was from around 10+ years ago .. in an interview with whom it sounded like the main dev at the time(don't remember the name). And the statement was a bit hyperbole as well, to get across the point, "you want a lot of things, so send a lot of money, so I can hire lots of people to make them happen, otherwise be patient"

So no worries, no one today is (afaik) abusing inkscape ..

My point is that people don't understand the necessity for a "vision guy" to direct UX in any program of appreciable size. And it's not like these kinds of people don't exist, or that they'd be unwilling to help. People just don't seem to even WANT them taking on these tasks on their projects.

And that's a real shame, because many of these projects are technical wonders that are borderline unusable for want of a loving touch.

When you are the main dev in such a project, would you be willing to give this huge responsibility to some guy who might loose interest after a few weeks? What then?

Also, I have seen people doing graphical sketches of possible UI's and people think nice - but it is a whole different thing to actually implement this (especially with so little money involved), when the to do list involves 10 million other things.

Also, usually the problem is the designers are not coders and quite often the code base is not designed in a way, where you can just swap out the UI for a new one.

But yes, I'd love to see more collaboration of designers with a vision and coders.

That seems a reasonable way to support additional features in an open source project, especially if the volunteer developers have no personal interest in the feature.

A one-line comment would be a bit brief. "This feature isn't planned, but one of the core developers would be willing to take on the work for payment. If that's interesting to you, we will estimate the cost."

That I am not criticizing the inkscape devs, for having implemented such a bad text support. They had other priorities and people like me, who would have liked it, did not pay enough money, to have it implemented. Simple as that. So the other comment was not neccesary.

Of course, as soon as you go outside that, you run into the fragmentation prevalent in the Linux desktop. For light computer users or people who can get by without a bunch of specialized graphical apps, it works well and is very intuitive.

If you are saying it has a bad UI, could you say more about what you tried to use it for, and what other vector-graphics program you've spent a lot of time in?