Martin believes everyone should have access to free quality software.
Thanks so much🙏
Any Inkscape pros know the best way to combine two pdfs using it? The page creation menus are clunky to me, and it's hard to keep the pages in order.
I don't use Inkscape, but that is a good hat.
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
This guy is rich as fuck. No wonder the billionaire class is so pissed.
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.
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.
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 user here. Thanks Martin!
Is Mr Owens British perchance?
Not all heroes wear capes.
Some wear bowler hats
I urge you to watch his update videos, he's such a neat guy, and he rocks a ska/dandy style
I've designed banners and flags in Inkscape, convention signage, even electoral campaign materials like business cards, handcards, campaign signs. A great tool
Nice. Anyone who takes money from Adobe is a hero to me.
I made nearly all the 2D assets in my game with Inkscape. It wouldn't have been possible without it.
inkscape is great, I use it all the time
Inkscape is still notably worse to use than Affinity Designer, despite having been started more than ten years earlier. Why?
I agree with you but one is a for profit product launched by a company with multiples of employees working full-time and with 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 their heart.
You can't really compare the two.
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:
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 question 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 task 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.
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.
Seriously fuck adobe. We use them at work and they have the shittiest management portal in the universe and also make it so hard to cancel subscriptions.
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