In light of this, I can't help but feel the OSS alternatives to the Adobe graphics suite are pretty abysmal.
Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.
GIMP's user experience in my opinion has been terrible for decades and every time I have given it a chance it's annoyed me into closing it. I can get things done, but it gets in my way.
As for Scribus I've never used it, but based on the previous two I'm not instilled with confidence.
> Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.
It is actually possible to build an intuitive UI for filters while staying compliant with SVG. You just have to abstract away the low level SVG primitives ("feColorMatrix", "feComponentTransfer", etc.) with user-friendly presets such as "Sepia" or "Drop shadow". I actually created a mockup for such UI in Inkscape long time ago [1] and I eventually implemented it in Boxy SVG [2].
Advanced filter editing could be improved by switching from tree-based to node-based UI, in similar fashion to e.g. Jasc WebDraw [3].
Personally speaking I’ve always found Inkscape frustrating compared to Sketch or Affinity Designer, but it’s in a different way than GIMP is. GIMP I think would mostly be fine if they just ditched all the quirky GIMP-unique UI conventions in favor of more commonplace counterparts (which in some cases is as “easy” as using standard GTK widgets instead of custom stuff) but who knows when or if that’ll happen.
Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.
GIMP's user experience in my opinion has been terrible for decades and every time I have given it a chance it's annoyed me into closing it. I can get things done, but it gets in my way.
As for Scribus I've never used it, but based on the previous two I'm not instilled with confidence.