A few days ago I tried 1.1.1 after a long absence on windows. I don't want to rain on your parade, but to be honest, it was a miserable experience.
Don't get me wrong: Inkscape is huge, it's quite an achievement and I'm glad we got an open source vector app. But everything feels so strange and awkward to use. And when you get further with your project, the input lag gets out of hand. Path effects and filters are cool, but the UI feels... Just strange. And they add even more lag to everything.
Oh and there's also the random crash now and then...
The exporting side could use some love too. You need to fallback to the commandline to export all layers or groups for example. But it's really cumbersome. And for some reason you can't even disable anti-aliased edges and it cuts of filters. Oh well...
Unfortunately I don't have enough time to contribute, sorry. Bought Affinity Designer this week and immediately fell in love. Everything just works, the UI is well thought out and it's snappy.
I don't know: I love open source. For example Blender or Gimp are great and improved massively over the years. We need something like Inkscape, but the current state simply doesn't cut it for me, sorry.
I don't have any performance problems and I use Inkscape quite extensively. Although I am using it on Linux. I always got the impression Inkscape and Gimp both work best on Linux.
I really like Inkscape quite a bit. But it took a lot of relearning after using Illustrator for decades. Once I got over that hump, I have very few complaints, especially for the price.
No doubt it could be better( as everything always can) but as primarily a developer who occasionally has to make/modify simple vector images and icons I love inkscape. I am sure if your a professional graphics artist using the software everyday the little stuff adds up and is really annoying but if your graphic design professional it's easy to justify shelling out cash for Adobe or similarly polished software. Inkscape in my view is for those of us who need to work with vector graphics regularly but not everyday.
The thing is, I'm spoiled. There are so many great vector applications out there. We're in an age, where we're able to run awesome vector applications in a browser. How cool is that!
I'm just saying, that Inkscape needs to massively improve to stay relevant. For example, I realized that I'm completely going crazy when an app just crashes on me. I'm not used to that anymore.
Well, I understand, that Inkscape can be usable as long as you're doing simple stuff and as long as you're staying on the happy path.
But a graphic application needs to get out of its way for the user, who just wants to be creative. And as I was using inkscape, I used more time fighting it than creating.
In my opinion it needs to completely revamp the UI and streamline everything. Similar to what Blender did. But right now, I have a harder time using Inkscape than Blender, which us not a good place for Inkscape to be in.
+1 though I disagree about Gimp. Tried to use it recently too and found the UI to be as much of a mess as Inkscape. All I wanted to do with Inkscape was open an SVG and change the color of one of the paths and re-export it and I could not make heads or tails of the UI.
Would be interesting to see how your mental model of how this should work differs from the inkscape developer's mental model. I would assume there's an easy way to achieve what you wanted to do, wonder why it is so hard to discover it.
Just tried it: open svg, select path, menu: object -> fill & stroke, change the color, menu: file -> save as. Done...
You lose 90% of the people here. One click should make the fill color changeable, two clicks the border color, and bring up / highlight the relevant panel automatically.
there is multipl ways how to skin a cat . you can single clisk to cahnge color fill. selct object an chose color from pallet down or click on color in info bar that wil open fill and stroke panel
Inkscape, GIMP, and Blender (haven’t tried since it’s 2.X release, but since this was true for decades, just roll with it) - have long had one thing in common that completely ruins any chance of seriously using the software for anything meaningful, for many; many people - and that - of course - is the UI/UX.
And I will deflect immediately the ‘well if you don’t like it, contribute’ to state - I’ve actually tried, in the past. I was involved with the GIMP coding community for a while post high school, because I actually do know that under this awful, counter-intuitive and ugly as all living hell software, there is actually great image rendering and editing code under there.
I’m not sure if it’s changed, I really hope it has - because it majorly turned me off of contributing to FOSS projects since - but the community was extremely hostile, at least to me - and; more importantly - nobody seemed to care about the work I was doing or wanted to do with regards to overhauling the UI/UX. It clearly wasn’t a priority for the rest of the team.
We need a dedicated team of 3-4 people to overhaul the awful useless mess of a UI/UX that a lot of these FOSS creative apps have - and it just never seems to come together, so the apps never get to a usable state in their UI/UX, so they never get as many people using them as they need to, so they never grow enough to find the team they need to in order to fix it.
I’ve been following this shit for 20 years, and at this point I’ve just given up on GIMP/Inkscape.
Unfortunately these particular projects seem to be run by people who just do not prioritize these things. I know just as well as the next back end coder that the functionality matters most. But this ‘function over form’ mentality for 20 years - in GIMP’s case - has led to one very ugly and counter-intuitive piece of software that could literally rival Photoshop if only it the team could change its mentality/philosophy a bit.
I’ve considered forking it to make something ‘usable’, but the thing is, I’d like to really help with the issue in the main app itself!
> but the community was extremely hostile, [...] nobody seemed to care about [...] overhauling the UI/UX
You realise that coming in new and wanting to immediately overhaul the UI/UX is not a sociable thing to do, right? In fact, people new to a project suggesting a huge overhaul is generally a red flag for their understanding of the project or their likelihood of being a good-faith contributor.
I do agree that the UI/UX of several tools needs an overhaul. Given the history of such efforts across many open source projects, it seems likely that a fork is the only way to pull that off. You'd need a talented UI (and fixup dev) team to make it worthwhile.
New contributors are actually in a much better position to judge UI/UX because they are not used to all the idiosyncrasies of the software yet.
I have used Gimp regularly and still like it, but it is... different, and not in a good way.
The fiasco that is exporting / saving for example, clearly shows that core developers don't care about users much. Which is fine, but it is a shame. I have stopped recommending Gimp some time ago.
Sounds like a great idea to create a UI/UX fork of Gimp, I would love to use it or even contribute. Not sure if you can build a community around it, but if you succeed, either your fork leads the way, or core Gimp ups their game - both of which are great options.
It's not about my attitude but about yours - I'm talking about the way social structures work in most cases. If you aren't willing to prove you can cooperate with a group, why would the group be willing to cooperate with you?
Stepping in with a replace-the-whole-UI idea is generally combative in nature and may engender combative responses. Rather than being surprised at the response, maybe think about whether what you did might cause it.
By odd analogy, it's like you're starting a career as a traffic engineer and immediately demanding the road surfaces get replaced, without demonstrating an understanding of why the road surface is the way it is or why projects to replace the road surface tend to fail.
(I'm not involved with the project, so my attitude doesn't matter and you don't need to worry about what I think.)
Inkscape has had the same basic UI for about a decade. I just upgraded this week on my machines to 1.1.2 after using 0.96 for a long while, and I felt at home still. Inkscape's UI hasn't changed much because there's really no other UI for SVG stuff. Look at Adobe Illustrator and you'll see that modulo some very small differences, there's a lot of the same UI in the same place or nearly the same place.
What has seriously improved in Inkscape over the last decade is definitely performance. Every release, I see major perf improvements.
Blender and GIMP have both had major UI overhauls, but Blender has seen the largest. in 2019, Blender threw out their old UI and built a whole fresh one for 2.80. 2.80's UI absolutely brought it up to the same par that a lot of professional tools are at now.
But to your point about community: Something I had to learn long ago was that all projects, open source or not, push against "Change for Change's Sake." Several attempts had been made at updating Blender's overall look and feel but with mixed reception, even from within.
The best way to get something done in any part of a well established ecosystem is to rally some friends, get a good proof of concept working, and present it. This is how three major changes in Linux have been done: Lennart Poettering, as much as you might disagree with him, stood up and said "Sound on linux sucks because you have to do a bunch of ioctl shit. Let's make a good API and a sound server to go along with it so you get all the advantages of modern audio routing". He then stood up again and said "you know what, sysV init sucks too, let's make something that handles the configuration for the vast majority of the peripherals on a system and the services that depend on those peripherals."
The fact of the matter is that most Open Source is maintained in the spare time between meetings and shifts flipping burgers:
* Lots of FOSS projects are one person maintained, in their spare time, more and more by people working dead end hourly jobs like retail. Seriously.
* The big ones out of companies are probably maintained by zero people full time.
Yeah, about two years ago I was trying different vector-based apps. Started with Sketch, tried Inkscape, but ended up with Affinity Designer too. The UI feels much better, and it’s far more stable.
One small gripe I have is that it doesn’t support many transforms in SVG without rasterizing them, where Inkscape often does.
I downloaded Inkscape because trying to use Gimp for pixel perfect graphics was an exercise in frustration.
Sadly, my experience seems to mirror yours, my first project crashed (no data loss, fortunately). Then I tried writing a simple plugin and it turned out 1.1.1 broke unit conversion.
Any time someone mentions alternative graphic design software I get a glimmer of hope, then check out product website and find that it's not available on Linux. I should be used to it by now.
I’m also fairly bitter about the handling of 1.0 on Windows. I reported various problems at the first beta in moderate detail, my report was more or less ignored and they went ahead with various significant regressions in performance and UI, largely because no developer was interested enough in Windows, and I and others evidently failed to convince them of just how bad it was on Windows; GTK+ 3 in general has shown a general disdain for doing Windows well, whereas GTK+ 2 had been worked over until it wasn’t too bad. Yes, Inkscape is done by volunteers, but I reckon that some of these issues should have been considered blockers to at least recommending 1.0 for Windows, if not its release. So I also stuck with 0.92 while on Windows.
But I very much like what I’m seeing in the draft release notes for 1.2: as well as some really nice-looking functionality improvements, they mention various performance improvements in approximately the areas that had the worst regressions in 1.0 (such as zooming and panning), and UI adjustments to reduce space consumed. I haven’t tried 1.2 alpha 1 out just yet, but I probably will in the next few days and I’m really looking forward to it. (Incidentally, I’ve been back on Linux for the last ten months, and using the latest releases, since it works better under Linux, though Adwaita is still horrifically wasteful of space given Inkscape’s habit of stacking many buttons side-by-side, so I installed Minwaita which reduces that problem a lot.)
It might even be, that the developers do not own a Windows machine. Did you ask them, whether they have one to test on and reproduce the slowdown? Or perhaps offer to buy them one? It is a pity that things slow down for you on Windows, but I don't really see, how it is their responsibility to cater to a proprietary system, that is actively hostile to its users.
Preferrably it wouls not slow down for you, ofc, but they may well deem it out of scope of their project to fix issues for asystem, that they do not have the code for to look at where it is going wrong, or simply do not have the time and resources to deal with that. Add to that, that any day MS could destroy the fruit of that work again.
I can understand, that they don't want to invest resources into that.
I appealed to them in concrete terms at one point not long before the release of 1.0: either fix things for Windows, or keep on recommending the 0.92 series for Windows. There’s no denying that for the 1.0 release Windows was a second-class citizen. There’s no reason why they couldn’t then say: “look, 1.0 is available, and if you want the new features you can use it, but it’s considerably slower than 0.92 and the Windows theme is very badly broken so you’ll be stuck using the Adwaita theme which is extremely wasteful of space, so all up we suggest sticking with 0.92 for now; BTW talk to us if you’re interested in helping to improve things or sponsoring such work”.
I used Inkscape on Win10 recently, and also on Kubuntu (21.04 a and 21.10, I think) and the experience was comparable.
I do not like the icon themes now, they're very low contrast and difficult to decipher for me so use the old, colourful icons I'm familiar with. Apart from that and one problem with a dialog not appearing until I selected the option a second time (the XML dialog), all worked well.
I think it's difficult, a x.0 might not be snappy, might even have serious issues, but there's not enough manpower resource to address everything at once, it's going to be incremental. Holding things back would negatively impact the momentum of the project IMO, but yes may benefit an individual.
Quite a few people have remarked on the performance problems. For the spacing thing, the use of Adwaita doubled the minimum width of things like the Fill & Stroke panel because of its excessive button padding, so that on my Surface Book (effectively 1500×1000) with the typical layout, I would end up with something like a 35–40% reduction in available canvas width (and maybe 10–15% for the height); but even the common resolution of 1920×1080 is going to suffer a fairly significant reduction in available width, compared to the Win32 theme.
But I couldn’t even properly switch back to the Win32 theme because of severe bugs that rendered it very problematic on all displays and basically completely unusable after a bit on any comparatively small high-DPI displays like my Surface Book’s. I don’t know if any of these issues have been fixed; I did try Inkscape 1.0 final briefly but decided it was still just too bad compared to 0.92. And now I’m back on Linux and so, like the Inkscape developers, don’t care all that much about Windows any more.
(https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/-/issues/879 was my initial report, including explanation of some of the major Win32 theme regressions. Given the adjacent topic in this thread of GTK 4, the mention of overlay scrollbars in that thread points to a mess too; https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GTK#Disable_overlay_scrollb... says: “as of GTK 4, the overlay nature of the scrollbars is part of the toolkit.” Ugh, GTK is obviously not interested in being a native look-and-feel toolkit if they deliberately remove the ability to control scrollbar overlayedness at the system level or in the theme. If you require the app to switch it on, it might as well not exist. Sounds like they’re continuing with the sabotage.)
GTK is a GNOME library and GNOME has shown in the past that they not only don't care about third party software but are actually extremely harmful to the community to the point that you might as well call it sabotage. The transition from GTK2 to GTK3 was extremely painful, had no benefits for anyone except GNOME and had many regressions across the board. The right course of action for Inkscape would be to switch back to GTK2 and be as independent from GNOME as possible. For everybody else it would be advised to make sure that your software runs well everywhere but GNOME. Simply check if getenv("XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP") is equal to "GNOME" and exit(EXIT_FAILURE) if true.
Display scaling is only supported by GTK 3 and later, so downgrading to GTK 2 would result in a blurry interface for a lot of users (and not just GNOME users). 1080p or higher resolution laptops and 4K monitors are quite common nowadays.
I can't agree with excluding all GNOME users from using an application, since it's not the fault of GNOME users in general that it's difficult to transition between major GTK versions.
Eh, GTK as a whole is… well, not healthy for cross-platform development. It used to be a good deal better (though it was never really excellent), but from GNOME 3 they’ve pretty much decided to flat-out ignore other platforms and their conventions, and shift GTK from being GNOME-focused but fairly platform agnostic with pretty good look-and-feel theming to being just GNOME GNOME GNOME and wildly out of place in look and feel everywhere else.
Of course, other options in a similar space like Qt aren’t entirely better in that they don’t behave fully like GNOME on GNOME platforms. The best cross-platform native-feel apps, like Firefox, tend to use GTK on Linux (or possibly KDE/Qt in KDE?) and other things on other platforms.
As a Linux user I inevitably use quite a bit of GTK software (though barely any GNOME stuff, if you savvy the distinction I’m drawing), but I dislike almost all of the directions it’s headed in since GNOME 3. Decent scaling is one of the few redeeming features.
sprash is describing a very—ahh—ideologically pure position, but I do deeply sympathise with a desire for a return to the GTK+ 2 ways. My ideal would probably be to scrap GTK+ 3 and 4 and create 5 derived mostly from GTK+ 2’s philosophies, just including the good technical parts of 3 and 4, but determinedly not a full style unto itself. Also I’m fed up with client-side decorations matter and want better support for server-side decorations, as was done traditionally and as is still generally preferable on Windows and in most Linux window managers, or even platform-matching client-side decorations, which would be good for macOS and Windows and frankly GNOME.
GNOME has basically sabotaged GTK as a cross-platform library—even as a Linux-wide thing (apart from KDE). They’ve taken it over to serve their own purposes and vision. Their vision does improve and unify some parts of GNOME desktops, but as a user of something other than GNOME (Sway), I don’t like most of what they’ve done to GTK.
Doesn't GTK4 address your complaints? To a certain degree, I think they've realized what you say. GTK4:
- decouples GNOME and GTK. They've created a new library, called libadwaita, that hosts the GNOME stuff.
- brings big performance improvements (it has GL and Vulkan backends)
- is much better on macOS and Windows.
Anyway, I agree with you on your points. One of the issues of opensource graphic programs is that the toolkits that are available are quite problematic/don't care about this use case. This is not just about GTK, as QT has also been causing a lot of headaches to the Krita developers. It is not by chance that Blender, which draws the UI using its own toolkit, is not affected by these issues and has a fantastic, fast UI.
Not the parent commenter, but I find GTK4 worse than GTK3 on non-GNOME Linux environments. The popovers capture input and hang your entire Xorg session until you press Esc (affecting EasyEffects), GTK4 has window creation race conditions breaking title bars on KWin and window positioning on KWin and xfwm4, and line height and text y-coordinates are non-integer and text is rendered at fractional vertical coordinates, resulting in blur even with hinting on (which assumes integer-pixel vertical positioning).
I might need to take a closer look at it at some point. I’ve never used anything that uses it, and I haven’t inspected it or grasped the scope of libadwaita, but most times I’ve heard anything about GTK 4, there have been major bad things—selection bias, to be sure, and perhaps confirmation bias, but it may indicate something. The three examples that come to mind immediately:
• They severely damaged text rendering and initially didn’t even acknowledge it as a defect, dismissing the report: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787. More recently there’s some movement on the issue, but the initial reaction was not a good look, at least.
• Of accessibility, they’ve completely redesigned it, in a way that is very convincingly better, or will be once it’s all finished including supporting tooling, but the impression I’ve received from a couple of communities where it’s come up a bit at times is that at least when they released GTK 4 and told people “start adopting it!”, GTK 4 apps were opaque to screen readers, because half the plumbing was missing. This impression could be false, and if there was any lack, hopefully it’s addressed by now.
I’m curious what the state of affairs is for approximating native look and feel on Windows. GTK+ 2 had a once-fairly-decent win32 theme that became fairly significantly out of date after Windows XP, but there were also some more recent themes that did parts better (and other parts worse). I’ve never seen a Windows theme for GTK+ 3 that is even halfway decent for look, and feel is a dead loss (e.g. menu keyboard behaviour and list box popup positioning and behaviour are both just painfully wrong).
If they’re serious about cross-platform, attempting to match Windows and macOS look and feel (and completely ignoring Linux, for a while) is where effort should be placed. I don’t know if they are.
On text rendering, I've seen that too and I agree with what you say, unfortunately. There is a difference between being professional/straight to the point, which I appreciate, and being dismissive.
On the other topics, I'm not informed enough, but at least it's good some work on the accessibility front is happening, compared to the dire situation of the last decade... I hope that eventually the situation improves. Accessibility improvements really benefit everyone.
Regarding the matching of the look and feel... in the last few years, this mindset has become very common, where each app is an island and no effort should be made to look native, because, in fact, there is no native look anymore. Windows has always been like this, and Linux desktops have started embracing that. From the app developer perspective, it's understandable. For the user, it means giving up decades of usability studies and the pleasantness of coherence. Given this direction, I expect GTK apps to look like GTK apps wherever they run, unfortunately. On the bright side, the default look of GTK4/adwaita apps is kinda similar to what macOS and Windows 11 are going for, so at least it won't look too alien over there.
To avoid the extreme slowdown (and crash after a while) on win10, close the document property tab (!!)
Anyway, inkscape has really disappointed me with multiple serious regressions. This + UI issues + layout problems + zoom buttons disappearing + crash due to version incompatibility + not remembering what unit you use + DPI screwup got me wondering if the people in charge really got what it takes to run the biggest FOSS creativity tool.
I mean, I'm grateful if exists. But I use this for technical documents at work and I need it to be stable. Oh well, I guess it's between this and being lured into 12 month contracts with Adobe...
It's easy to forget that Inkscape is run purely with volunteers, is a charity with 0 employees. I get that these problems are frustrating but maybe it would be more appropriate to wonder how is even possible that this project runs so well :D.
Some technical problems are outside our power. Mainly performance regression was introduced by gtk3. Which was a big blow to the whole project because it took 5years of work. And in the end, we discovered that technology is just slow and we need to migrate once again if we want to fix it.
Bugs are not ignored we just simply don't have enough manpower to fix them all
I hear you, and as a FOSS maintaineryaelf I agree that it is frustrating to see all complaints but no volunteers.
But, many issues in Inkscape are due to bugs introduced by changes that were not properly tested. If you have resources to change things around, you should also test the outcome properly before you hit that release button.
i hope you dont take this wrong way but ... what you are suggesting is if you cannot do it ""proplerly'" dont do it at all ... testing such a huge project as inkscape is a lot of work. perosnaly i do it a lot but sometimes you just cannot catch it all. "We" dont have receorses we have just developers that are sometimes work on stuff
I've used Inkscape for MacOS for many years off and on. Thank you very much for having made that possible.
Recent versions have been very difficult to use because of the performance degradation. But my gratitude is not diminished even if I am basically forced to find something else.
Cross-platform GUI is an incredibly difficult problem because 1. GUIs are huge and complex, and 2. Vendor lock-in is in the interest of the platform purveyors. GTK exists in a challenging space, and I empathize not only with the downstream users such as Inkscape affected by its troubles but with the GTK developers.
If it were easy to produce a featureful, performant, and developer-friendly cross-platform GUI library, someone would have done so. The demand is so acute that many projects even resort to the outrageous brute-force approach of Electron.
I love all FOSS cross-platform GUI endeavors, even when they get tripped up. You are doing great and important work — I salute you.
Do you think you or the parent commenter can look into debugging or fixing the bugs yourself? I'm also disappointed at buggy software, poorly considered changes, and maintainers ignoring bug reports. But (sometimes) I try (and occasionally succeed) to fix bugs I encounter.
Debugging and contributing to large and complex C++ projects is not trivial. I personally do debug and contribute to open source projects using technologies I’m confident with, but when it comes to Inkscape I can’t do much more than to do nothing and to hope for the best.
Not sure about how the story with Inkscape looks, but it can be difficult to deliver the reproducible issue. You might have to build it yourself, might have to install a compiler in the right version and so on. Depending on the build story of Inkscape, this can take days of fumbling. Not many users are willing to go through that.
I would say it is OK to open an issue, which is not 100% reproducible, as long as it has not been opened. It allows for the chance, that others can try to find that reproducible way of causing the issue, who are more knowledgable about the software and might have the dev setup already on their machines.
A good issue report requires some knowledge and expertise though. Anyone can say it doesn’t work as expected, but it’s harder to identify and reproduce the problem and provide all the useful details.
When I was still using Windows I was using corel draw. I still believe it was (and I suspect still is) the best vector drawing program for more technical drawings. Just one example:alignment is really deeply build into the system using a set of keyboard shortcuts so instead of always going to the align and distribute tab you just pressed "e" to align the previous object. It was really so much faster for drawing than illustrator or inkscape.
Unfortunately there is no Linux version otherwise I'd happily buy it.
Check Boxy SVG for an SVG-focused vector graphics editor. Its UI is heavily inspired by Inkscape and the Linux version is available for free (you just have to run "snap install boxy-svg").
You're right, the power of Inkscape is its ability to work natively with SVG capabilities and its technical aspects (instead of some obscure proprietary format). Affinity is more artist-focused.
I've been working with graphics for a couple decades and I have many old files in formats that I can no longer open. I am strongly biased towards Inkscape for its use of an open standard as its file format.
I'm on MacOS where current versions of Inkscape are not really usable because of (understandable) performance degradations. I wish that either those problems could be solved, or that an alternative existed which used an open file format.
I'd prefer a pure FOSS solution, but as I'm a BSD-school FOSS person I wouldn't mind a proprietary app so long as that proprietary app used an open file format. It sucks that Affinity uses a proprietary format which is at high risk for orphaning or degradation either if they decide it's in their business interests or if the company ceases to exist.
Oh, that's a fun one; my document property tab disappeared once and I wasn't able to retrieve it. I don't know if that was when I started having issues, but no amount of reboots without the document property tab felt like it fixed it for me.
On a Linux 4K Wayland desktop, Inkscape has been slower a year or two ago, this last 6 months it has become really fast panning and zooming even fairly complex pages.
The guys there have been doing great work. Maybe they need more helping hands that care about windows.
I've only used post 1.x versions and they've had a lot of freezing issues but I thought that's just the way the program was. After seeing this I'm going to try 0.92 and see if it's smoother
I've been plagued with lagging and crashes on Linux too in the last few months.
But then I rebuilt from master in an attempt to get a traceback or profile to report and it went away, so hopefully whatever that was has been fixed and just got released.
Though I have to say I think hiding the snap controls behind a button, as opposed to a toolbar, is a mistake.
I had marginal performance degradation, but that may be due to the specific techniques I use it for, but there definitely was a change southward, just not anywhere nearly as poor as I'm hearing from others.
Inkscape is still very usable/utile, but I certainly don't want that trend to continue, as it would rapidly become not so.
Don't get me wrong: Inkscape is huge, it's quite an achievement and I'm glad we got an open source vector app. But everything feels so strange and awkward to use. And when you get further with your project, the input lag gets out of hand. Path effects and filters are cool, but the UI feels... Just strange. And they add even more lag to everything.
Oh and there's also the random crash now and then...
The exporting side could use some love too. You need to fallback to the commandline to export all layers or groups for example. But it's really cumbersome. And for some reason you can't even disable anti-aliased edges and it cuts of filters. Oh well...
Unfortunately I don't have enough time to contribute, sorry. Bought Affinity Designer this week and immediately fell in love. Everything just works, the UI is well thought out and it's snappy.
I don't know: I love open source. For example Blender or Gimp are great and improved massively over the years. We need something like Inkscape, but the current state simply doesn't cut it for me, sorry.