1.0 RC 1 has multiple critical, debilitating issues on Windows that should block release
For 1.0 beta 1, I gave a bunch of feedback in #879 (closed). It seems to have been completely ignored.
Every single one of those issues still applies to 1.0 RC 1. A couple of them are debilitating, like the overlay scrollbar in the sidebar which prevents access to content or controls on the right hand edge of such panels. Others make Inkscape harder to use (missing submenu arrows, overly large controls substantially reducing the canvas space available). Still others just make Inkscape look very bad, e.g. controls that are drawn waaaay larger than they should be, and controls that draw the wrong thing altogether (e.g. I just discovered that hovering on a horizontal scrollbar that can’t scroll any further right replaces the active right arrow with an active up arrow instead of an inactive right arrow as other arrows do—not that using an inactive arrow colour is the platform-native behaviour anyway). The win32 theme in this is just bad in so many ways (ways that it wasn’t in the 0.92 series), but Adwaita is so obscenely wasteful of space (because of Inkscape’s liberal use of buttons) that it’s even worse.
(Aside: I’ve steadily come to the conclusion that GTK is just all-round bad at Windowsing; and GTK 3 is substantially worse than GTK 2 was.)
Some things seem like they may be even worse in the RC than they were in the beta, but that might just be that I’m opening a different set of documents. I didn’t open any particularly complex documents in the beta, and I don’t have it handy any more and am disinclined to download it now.
Documents like the tutorials (e.g. Help → Tutorials → Inkscape: Advanced) are causing multi-second lockups very regularly. I don’t mean when opening it—that’s always been the case. I mean just things like panning around—the application is locking up for 6–8 seconds every ten or fifteen seconds of use in many of the things I’m trying doing. And switching to another application and then after a minute (sometimes even after only a few seconds!) switching back? Yep, there’s another lockup, most likely.
This is completely unusable. I cannot use Inkscape 1.0 until some of the performance, lockup and UI issues are resolved.
And so I must continue to use the 0.92 series indefinitely. This is a shame, because I’ve been looking forward to quite a few of the things in 1.0. But I can’t use Inkscape 1.0 while it’s in this shape. It’s just broken, badly broken, in several ways.
Please don’t release Inkscape 1.0 for Windows yet (even if you release it for other platforms, if they don’t suffer from these issues—though I acknowledge having a different recommended version for one platform would be decidedly odd).
Some later notes:
- After leaving the window alone for a while in the background, I had it flicker once for a frame or two on top of my screen. That’s not good.
- After opening the Icon Preview panel, I’m finding it contentedly guzzling 1–2 cores until process exit. This used to be a thing, but I believe it got fixed a few years back, and I can’t reproduce it in 0.92.4. Possible regression?
- Inkscape 1.0 is consistently using 30–45% more memory than 0.92.4 on the same documents, including empty documents. This isn’t catastrophic, but it’s a fairly serious regression as such things go, and it does make me unhappy.