You don't expect first year French students to learn perfect French by the end of the first class, either. Baby steps, man.
Well it is not that easy. You are not suppose to learn perfect french out of the first class, but you are NOT suppose to learn wrong french. Why the best time to learn some external language is when you are VERY young (4 years old ?) because you DONT transpose from one language to the other, you learn (as a native speaker do) ... on the run, how it comes.
I do not want to misjudge a work that have been done, but I work with someone coming from press-world (that is Illustrator, photosohp, quark express) 10 years of practice. I decided to switch her from mac to linux and from thoses softs to Inkscape, gimp, scribus.
Sometime, that was a hard day (how can i ... where is the tool that ... why did that do that...) and, as i am not a designer nor users, just web developper i didn't know, i didn't even know what she was speaking about.
Sometimes, reading the mailling list, i discovered some features (such as ctrl+something..) and when i was trying to tell her, she had already discovered it.
The point is if you really want to use one soft like Inkscape, no matter what it does, no matter how it works, no matter how you are used to do things, work with it and just do it (TM inside).
The only thing i could say (and i did it more than hundred times) was : "Yes you can do it, but not the way you were used to do it". Today (that is 6 month latter) she designed web sites with it, i don't think she will accept to swich back to mac.
And, just by the way, because we are here, how much of the Illustrator users we are suppose to 'convince' owns legally the illustator they use : One machine : one license. ?
that is my 2 cts
and one more : speaking to developpers is REALLY important : it is not beause you can't do it with adobe that it must be silenced. The most important thing with Inkscape (and other open source soft) is that you can ASK for YOUR tool or tricks to developpers or (if you can) code it. That CAN'T BE ignored
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