Hello, I would like to share something that I have found extremely helpful,
before I migrated completely to linux I had adobe illustrator and photoshop etc. But then I left window because of all its problems and now I use linux exclusively.
The problem that I had faced in the past was whenever I had to use drawings I had made in adobe illustrator cs and obviously because of format differences I couldn't open them with inkscape. Well today I was excited to have found a workaround to this problem.
before I continue you will need to have the program called GIMP installed in addition to Inkscape
Here is my solution:
1) Go to the folder where you have your adobe illustrator file 2) Right click on the adobe Illustrator file and choose to open it with GIMP, this will cause GIMP to load 3)GIMP will ask you a few things via a new window you, if you know what you are doing feel free to modify them if not you can just click ok 4) Once the file loads in GIMP you can go to file-->Save AS, then type the name that you want and change the extension of the file to JPEG. After you do that click OK 5) when you click ok GIMP will notify you that it needs to export the drawing, go ahead and slide the quality to 100% and click ok 6) after your drawing has been converted to JPEG open up Inkscape and go to --->File-->Import bitmap, then browse to the folder where the JPEG file is stored and click open. This will then place your drawing in the INKSCAPE program. 7)When you have the drawing there you can use the Pen tool in Inkscape to trace over your artwork once you are done you can discard the imported JPEG and save your file as native inkscape file.
As you can see this solution requires some work to be done but hey, at least you are able to use your Adobe Illustrator files and not panic about not being able to open them like what happened to me in the past.
I hope this helps, if some one else has an easier solution feel free to let me know.
Also maybe the developers of Inkscape can ask the ones who develop GIMP to see what sort of converter they use to be able to open Adobe Illustrator files.