The Verdict
Vector drawing applications
Inkscape is the most generously featured of the drawing programs that we’ve tested. As often as not, when you select a drawing tool, an extra toolbar or sidebar opens up showing you the many detailed options on offer. It’s a difficult task for the developers to create an interface that gives access to the masses of features and options, and we feel that they have only been partly successful in this area. From time to time, you have to hit the documentation to figure out how to do something, and the trick of adding many dialogs to the sidebar feels like a kludge. That said, the shortcomings of the user interface are of a type that mainly impairs the initial attempt to carry out an action rather than in general use. Even for less artistically inclined Linux users, it’s worth knowing about Inkscape for those occasions when you need to add some text to an image or something like that.