Although I like the concept, the implementation takes a long time to learn, and the keystrokes aren't organized in a manner that lends itself to deducing different functions easily by experimentation. The problem I've always had working with Inkscape though, is that its command map is about four miles long, and most of the common functions still require two key combinations. After all, I'm the guy who prefers Blender over other the legal, licensed commercial 3-D and compositing systems I have in my shop because of its two-fisted approach-relying on hotkeys for the commands and the mouse for manipulation makes the work flow fast. Now, I'm willing to go a long way to learn an interface, and in theory, I like Inkscape's two-fisted approach. My second beef with Inkscape (and really, I only have the two), is the interface. When you're in a groove trying to create and polish something, having to wait for the program to catch up really, really sucks. The slowness quickly becomes apparent when using Inkscape to work at the coffee shop on my less-than-top-of-the-line laptop instead of at home on my holy-crap-it's-HAL graphics workstation. The memory footprint-especially when a large illustration is loaded-is heftier than The GIMP's, an app that is not noted for its modest memory usage and speedy response when editing complicated projects. It's a good program, and among the available open-source vector graphics apps, it's right up near the top of the heap for feature completeness, quality of implementation and lack of bugs, but it's not without its problems.įirst, it's slow. If you don't, a number of options are available, the most popular among them being Inkscape, which I've used as needed for a couple years now. If you really, really need Adobe Illustrator, you can use Wine or CrossOver.