Another piece of 2D vector software that I use and recommend is Graphite [1]. It too is open source. Graphite has nodes and can be procedural in nature. Have them both in your graphics toolbox.
Almost everything you need to create vector art, SVG doesn't support.
Multiple outlines in a single shape? No. Varying thickness in an outline? No. Rounded corners on arbitrary vertices? No. Non-destructive boolean operations? No. I'm not even sure SVG supports paragraphs.
Many of these Inkscape implements as live filters, which are saved as SVG extensions in the XML .svg file that nobody but Inkscape can properly load.
SVG is ridiculously bad as a creation format. It's a good format to export to, but as a backend and it's just insane. It's like using a single PNG file as a backend for your multi-layer 128bpp raster project.
I use Inkscape a lot but I can't help but notice that the best vector art illustration come from Affinity Designer, Corel Draw, and Adobe Illustrator. If you compare the quality of artwork made with proprietary tools to those made with Inkscape, it's very clear that Inkscape severely limits what artists can achieve. You can easily create complex illustrations in other tools that would be a nightmare to manage in Inkscape. Just compare how you clip something in Inkscape to how you do it in Affinity. It's ridiculous how different the two workflows are.
I also used CorelDraw for many years before moving on to Inkscape, and there were definitely some features that I still miss (e.g. better power clip behavior, blend shapes, etc). But I have came to appreciate Inkscape using SVGs because it allowed me to build my own tooling around it, I only needed libraries that can read and write XML.
SVG is maybe not the best format and Inkscape has many extensions that made their SVGs nonstandard (e.g. mesh gradient), but it is a fairly accessible format. I am not sure the gains promised by a proprietary format would be worth losing out on various SVG/XML tools.
Do all the others (AD, CD, AI) use some proprietary format that makes their life easier? Is there no better alternative to SVG on the open source side of things?
So say you want to make something like a wall with a tunnel/cave and a road in it. You can draw a rectnagle, a circle, put the circle inside the rectangle and it's clipped, then use a triangle for the road and put it inside the circle and it's clipped.
In Inkscape you need to select both shapes and use clip group. Which shape clips which depends on which shape is above the other. I can't tell you which one sould be above, by the way, because I never remember it. If you want to clip one shape by another shape that is already inside a clipping group, you have another problem because you need to double click the group to be able to selected the clipped shape. The more layers of clipping you have, the more you have to double click.
The layer structure is also different. In Affinity, the shape itself is the group and occupies only 1 line in the layers window. In Inkscape, every clipping group creates 3 entries in the objects window. One for the group itself, one for the shape at the background, and one for the shapes being clipped. So in Inkscape you have something like:
g277 (this is the group)
-> circle
-> Clip
---> rectangle
In affinity you have:
rectangle
-> circle
which runs well in Mac OS and Linux and for the basics has the basic vector editing capabilities which folks would expect.
Considering those operations are available in other vector art tools that aren't constrained by directly using SVG as the fundamental editing format it seems like a reasonable complaint.
Maybe if we surrounded ourselves with beautiful and sensible tools it would be easier for us to write beautiful or sensible applications. Maybe there would be fewer dancing bears.
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/5167
Before this option appeared in Inkscape nightly builds, I had no way of automating a pipeline to rasterize SVGs into black&white PNGs in a pixel perfect way.
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.
I think Inkspace probably should have its own UI kit rendered directly on GPU. That's lot of work however.
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:~]$ 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
For example, for the longest time, if you put the cursor in a text field and then hit cmd-A to select all text, it would interpret that to mean select all objects in the canvas instead. Another thing is that sometimes when I click and drag the corner of the window to resize it, the thing just won't budge. It takes several attempts before it actually works. Very frustrating, but it's open source and gets the job done for the most part, so it's very hard for me to move away from it.
That could make the path from Designer to FreeCAD a bit easier; FreeCAD still has something of a special relationship with Inkscape SVG files.
As noted elsethread:
Wick Editor implements some aspects of the vector drawing from Flash: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/
If you're willing to consider a commercial option, Serif's Affinity Designer may suit.
Presently one workflow to work around it is to consider a small area of the canvas as a palette area and create lines/objects in them and apply the desires styles on them. Then duplicate these palette objects into your main drawing.
(It's really not too difficult.)
https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-996-notes.pdf (page 18) https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/996
If you want your media to be stolen to generate 'new' media, choose Adobe. If you want to own your produced media, choose free software, such as Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, Cinelerra-CV, KDEnlive, Blender, Ardour.