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Comment by thot_experiment

9 hours ago

Is there an OS it's not horribly laggy on? Last time I used it you couldn't even get previews of things when you dragged them around, it would just degrade to a bounding box. Heaven forbid you have a scene with any complexity.

Every time I see an Inkscape update I skim it for "massive performance upgrades" and am invariably disappointed. Inkscape doesn't need features, it needs to not lag for 5 seconds when I open a menu, it needs to run at 100+fps when I'm editing paths.

EDIT: I installed the latest version (under W10) and while it doesn't degrade to bounding boxes it's still like 10fps and it leaves trailing copies of the item being dragged around the canvas while I'm dragging. Really disappointing.

Strange. I've been using Inkscape to make vector art on Windows and Ubuntu with various hardware for years and while I don't think it's ever running at 100+ fps it's totally usable and hasn't been laggy. [edit: unless you are using filters or editing a very complex file, it does bog down then.]

Can't say about Windows but on Linux - it works flawlessly since ages.

  • Just installed under Arch and while performance is better and there are no solitaire style copy-trails when I drag stuff it's still like 15-20fps when I'm dragging even a simple shape around while Illustrator manages 170fps without issue even with complex nested groups.

    • Illustrator is on Linux too? Could this low frame rate be related to missing drivers? Very less likely though.

      I think Inkspace probably should have its own UI kit rendered directly on GPU. That's lot of work however.

1.3.2 works fine on MacOS (M2 Pro) for me. There's a bit of lag following the mouse cursor especially when moving stuff quickly but the UI widgets are performant and there are no visual artifacts.

  • Ditto, I wouldn't quite say it flies on my M1 MBA, but performance is by no means frustratingly laggy. I use Inkscape a lot on both my MBA and Surface Laptop and it is much more frustrating on the latter device. The lack of support for fractional scaling is an annoyance on my 150% scaled Surface. The tiny UI has to be remedied by pinning a .bat to my taskbar and disguising it as Inkscape, with the following code:

    cd <Inkscape directory>

    set GDK_SCALE=2

    start inkscape.exe

    And within Inkscape using the Minwaita-Inkscape theme and 80% font scaling to scale back the otherwise-now-too-big UI.

    On both my Mac and PC, the main frustration once the UI is scaled correctly is that often closing pop-up windows (i.e. Document Properties) simply doesn't work. Sometimes using Inkscape's tab close button rather than the MacOS/Windows close window button works, but other times the whole app will freeze up and crash when attempting to close these pop-up windows. Have had this issue for multiple Inkscape versions now, hoping the devs find a way to fix it.

$ nix-shell -p inkscape

[nix-shell:~]$ inkscape --version Inkscape 1.3.2 (091e20ef0f, 2023-11-25)

[nix-shell:~]$ nixos-version 24.05.3787.a781ff33ae25 (Uakari)

Seems flawless for me. simple example I made: https://imgur.com/a/wi0kXbm