I really wanted to like penpot, but when I tried a few months ago, simply navigating between pages (even on the example documents) was causing parts of the document to change in bizarre ways. I didn't want that level of risk with documents I actually cared about, so continued to use figma. I guess it's time to give it another shot.
I've loaded an example document and do not see what you mean when navigating between pages. A problem like that should be extremely jarring and it is very hard to believe it would be ignored.
I click to navigate to the "Examples" page (I am gesturing with my mouse to circle around the bit I want you to look at). Then i navigate to "Main components", and back to "Examples" and the content in that area has changed. Here the buttons have changed to half the width they were, for example.
I think it would help to open an issue on github making explicit the following three points explicit in the report:
- steps to reproduce from scratch;
- what you expected to happen;
- what you actually observed (include the screenshot or video capture in addition to a textual description).
Otherwise, you might risk your report being ignored due to a silent misunderstanding about the mismatch between your expectations and the actual results.
At the time i wasn't sure if it was PEBCAK, which is why i started a discussion in the forums. As there were no replies, i received no notifications, and so I forgot all about it.
Personally, I do not understand why you think there is a bug from this screen capture alone. Maybe because I am that familiar with penpot and figma, but still, I do not find it obvious.
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the three points in text:
- steps to reproduce;
- what you expected to happen;
- what actual result you observe instead.
Something that might be obvious to you but isn't for others will just be silently ignored most of the time.
EDIT: I now see the problem after reading your other reply above:
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the difference between what you expected and what you observed. I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.
For now. Mattermost too used to be cheaper than Slack, and Gitlab too used to be cheaper than GitHub. I know the story, "look we did X, the open-source Y" and two years in you now have two versions, the free and the "enterprise" one with exclusive features.
1. Like Sentry - open source all the features, provide the cloud (hosted) version. Most businesses don't want to self-host, but want a bit cheaper alternative
2. Paid tier, buy once - own forever with 1 year update support. Later you can charge lower price to extend the update cycle.
3. Blender model - donations. Very hard to get it right.
4. Laravel/Next.js model - Open source the tooling, monetize the platform
The open core model is fine, but your community edition should be a reasonably complete product. Gitlab is a good example of this. They're not selling access, they're selling convenience.
The features that differentiate to enterprise customers don't matter to small shops anyhow: policy compliance, monitoring, fancy reporting, fine grained access control,etc. Give away tools that are useful for individuals and small teams, and charge for the features that are large team/enterprise related.
It's a little like "unlimited holidays". If you turn up on day 1 and then say "Right, I'm off on my unlimited holidays! See you never!" and disappeared, they would stop paying you. There is an implicit fair use clause in all unlimited offers - I know a guy who pushed back on "unlimited holidays" because he didn't want to get penalised in performance reviews and it turns out that in his UK-based org it was 29 days a year, or one day more than the legal statutory minimum.
Firms like penpot are basically saying "look, if you pay us this much, we're not going to put hard quotas on you, just get on with it", but if you then try storing backups of annas archive on it, they are probably going to suggest that you are not operating within the spirit of the agreement, even if you're within the letter of it: fair use will apply.
Some people like to know where they stand. They want hard quotas. So fine, ask them for hard quotas. Ask for the fair use clause and understand it.
Most of us know what it means (it's a soft quota with fair use limitations), and are happy with not abusing the tier and having a bit more freedom, though.
Hah. I'm a self employed freelancer, but a friend works for (MegaCorp Intl) and every time we go for beers he mentions that he has "Unlimited Paid Time Off". But whenever I ask if that means he could take a few months to hike the Andes with me, he says.... well, no, actually they'd fire him if he took too much time. How much is too much? I ask. Well basically anything that would make them notice his absence, apparently.
And there's a problem in the other direction too - I don't expect people who really can leave for a few months without their absence being noticable to have much job security.
This is a corporate culture thing. I can be in the middle of nowhere for months, and it makes no difference to my clients. No one even notices. I have a phone that always rings, and laptop. I don't have a corporate health plan or a 401k but I don't have to ask permission..
The issue is that if storage is too cheap, people will inevitably mine filecoin on it. Additionally, promising "unlimited storage" and not holding that promise might be a legal liability.
Does it really matter if in real-world-use 99% of the users never hit any limit? And I cannot blame anyone to use "unlimited" instead of "fair use, with reasonably large limits so that you will (probably) never see any restrictions in your use of the product"
People see 'unlimited' and will do everything in their power to 'fact-check' it, forcing the producer to place a 'hard cap' and making everyone's life worse.
It might have become socially acceptable to lie when everyone else is, but it is still a lie. Back in my days, you at least had to put an asterisk behind such outrageous claims.
Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.
Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.
If there is a limit then it isn't unlimited. That's what the word unlimited means.
Either it is unlimited or it is not. If you call something unlimited then there should not be a limit. You cant abuse it, it's unlimited. There is no limit, so you can never go beyond the limit which means you can never abuse it.
That's what unlimited means. If you mean something else then use a different word.
It absolutely is a lie, but you might live in a society where constant lying has been normalized. Personally, I believe that society would be better off if companies were held to the letter of their words.
Because that’s not a lie; under special circumstances, it can be true.
For example, consider a restaurant that offers free rice refills because Asian people love eating rice to fill up. An employee working overtime who really needs it can get as many refills as they want.
Of course, this system falls apart if everyone starts doing it, as the restaurant would need to bake that cost into the price to sustain the business.
But my point is: you can have nice things in society, or you can have a dystopia where people take advantage of each other at every single opportunity.
A dystopia is where people lie about free rice bowls to get people in the door but can't deliver. That's not nice things its taking advantage of a lie and blaming people who take up the offer.
Yes because you build it with trust, I trust you to not ruin this things so everyone can enjoy it
I can understand where you coming from because when I watch YT videos about people that exploit the loophole or game the system, people literally praise them for "beating the game" and this is happen mostly with US where everyone is materialistic
but my counter argument is game theory, where everyone can cooperate for betterment of your environment
I would say it's the opposite. If there is moral compass and we don't get high-up if someone tries to store their Linux isos on pen pot and gets a ban.
Also, when it comes to UI elements this is my go to vector editor. Keeps things simple, has good ways of handling units and layout. A pleasure designing custom icons, or quick graphical elements. Plus a great export system to keep things organized.
There are many things you can do besides full app flows, it doesn't dictate how you use it. Really reminds me of early Sketch and how productive I was with it. Its wild that this is open source.
It is my go-to vector editor as well. But a large pain point is that text elements cannot be vectorized or converted to paths or shapes. So your designs cannot be exported meaningfully because there is no guarantee that the receiving end will have the same fonts you designed with.
Exporting to svg may look completely different when opened elsewhere if your designs have any text elements.
Figma has become absolutely shocking in the past few years. The performance is so bad these days. It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document. I’ve seen Figma documents with hundreds of screens.
> It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document
That’s how these tools encourage you to use them. If the tool crumbles under its own usage modalities, that’s because it’s poorly designed, not the user’s fault.
You don't need to split into multiple files to make large documents manageable, multiple pages works just fine (pages you're not using aren't loaded). But even still, I have absolutely massive pages with ~100 screens on them that work just fine on this base-tier M2 MBA.
Honestly given the complexity of the screens involved I feel Figma's performance is pretty reasonable. (Now, library publish and update - that's still unreasonably slow IMO)
> Penpot Desktop loads the Penpot web application like a browser does. For offline use, the built-in local instance creator can set up and run a local Penpot instance via Docker (per the official self‑hosting guide).
Came here to complain about the same. I downloaded the app, but it needs an online account. What's the whole purpose of making it open source and downloadable, if it doesn't work offline?
I tried Motiff and penpot, to be framk Motif was way superior than both figma and penpot in terms of rendering and performance with large design files. unfortunately they shutdown due to lawsuits. Went back to figma.
Why don’t they provide a desktop version, similar to software such as GIMP, Inkscape, and others?
Do they believe they cannot achieve the desired revenue through crowdfunding? Many projects—most notably Blender—have been highly successful using this approach. It seems unreasonable that an average designer should be required to learn server administration
I am not sure what you are really asking here. They have almost 20k commits of frontend and server code [0] over half a decade of development. What would a desktop version of this look like outside of a bundled Tauri/Electron wrapper?
I am referring to the convenience of being able to download it from the store and start using it immediately. If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users
The closest analogy would be Sketch for macOS, which Figma simply copied at first, and then mostly replaced. I would love to see open source Sketch for open source systems.
From the user perspective Figma is great, and I might say it’s even better. However, all that came from throwing more money into the problem, I believe. Figma just won because they invested unlimited money into this, while Sketch might be self-funding, if I’m correct here. To me this is rather ‘money is a very nice asset to have’ kind of thing.
Figma has set an expectation for designers that their projects support multi-user editing by default and are available to clients, teammates and stakeholders without having to install anything. Its hard to go against that kind of productivity in any org.
I feel like we are in a godlden age of foss tools that are reasonably competitive with existing proprietary incumbants.
I'm going to try to run an instance for my local creative community. If everyone chips in server costs and donation, then it would be huge savings for everyone.
It's amazing how the design world in my experience loves to use closed-source software, Figma first. The chiasm with the dev world is huge. Penpot's cool in this perspective.
So, Java instead of wasm, but open source. While LogSeq is an open source copycat (not really) of Obsidian, I simply can’t stand it. I have tried Penpot a couple of years back, so cannot say anything about it, with the exception that I noticed it’s Clojure. Would love to learn more if someone can comment on that. I guess I’m biased against Java, but I’m not experienced with it, so I may be very wrong on that one. Of course having an open-source Figma around feels empowering, so much it is ingrained into the current dev process.
Penpot is also implemented in Clojure/ClojureScript. ClojureScript is a Clojure Dialect which compiles down to JavaScript. So there is no Java involved on the frontend :)
Perhaps my bad. I just don’t know Clojure at all, and honestly it might be the first time I’m seeing it, hence the mistake. My quick search prior to my posting returned this:
>Clojure is a dynamic and functional dialect of the programming language Lisp on the Java platform.
So I thought this is built on Java, or like that. I’d love if someone could explain it in simple terms, as I’d love to drop the ‘Java = bad’ attitude. It’s just that my prior experience taught me to stay away from Java.
There are a few things to unpack here. Clojure is a lisp hosted on the Java virtual machine (JVM). Subsequently, someone created Clojurescript which is an implementation (of the vast majority of) Clojure that compiles to JavaScript. The majority of Clojure code can run on either.
“Java = bad” is also something that you should probably drop. The JVM in particular is a very robust host and there’s a large ecosystem for it. Java the language has also improved over the years, but the JVM is great (and has a large market share as a result).
With the integration of AI, people are using Figma for more than just design.
A recent use-case that a friend was gushing about:
- Input notes, data into Figma and ask its AI to summarize it into presentation worthy slides with built-in games to keep meeting members engaged, and host them to a website.
Interesting. No idea how it works, but I'm willing to try this out for a quick test as long as I can self host it
I really wanted to like penpot, but when I tried a few months ago, simply navigating between pages (even on the example documents) was causing parts of the document to change in bizarre ways. I didn't want that level of risk with documents I actually cared about, so continued to use figma. I guess it's time to give it another shot.
EDIT: still broken 8 months later :(
I've loaded an example document and do not see what you mean when navigating between pages. A problem like that should be extremely jarring and it is very hard to believe it would be ignored.
> A problem like that should be extremely jarring
Agreed - I don't see how its not glaringly obvious to anyone who uses the app:
https://imgur.com/a/hZ1ja9o
Sometimes the changes are even more pronounced - even repeating this exact same sequence.
[delayed]
Genuinely asking - what's the issue? I don't see it.
I click to navigate to the "Examples" page (I am gesturing with my mouse to circle around the bit I want you to look at). Then i navigate to "Main components", and back to "Examples" and the content in that area has changed. Here the buttons have changed to half the width they were, for example.
I think you should post a issue at this point D:
I raised the issue in the forums at the time, with video captures demonstrating the issue(s).
I think it would help to open an issue on github making explicit the following three points explicit in the report:
- steps to reproduce from scratch;
- what you expected to happen;
- what you actually observed (include the screenshot or video capture in addition to a textual description).
Otherwise, you might risk your report being ignored due to a silent misunderstanding about the mismatch between your expectations and the actual results.
At the time i wasn't sure if it was PEBCAK, which is why i started a discussion in the forums. As there were no replies, i received no notifications, and so I forgot all about it.
If anyone is interested in opening a bug report you can see the issue here: https://imgur.com/a/hZ1ja9o
Personally, I do not understand why you think there is a bug from this screen capture alone. Maybe because I am that familiar with penpot and figma, but still, I do not find it obvious.
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the three points in text:
- steps to reproduce;
- what you expected to happen;
- what actual result you observe instead.
Something that might be obvious to you but isn't for others will just be silently ignored most of the time.
EDIT: I now see the problem after reading your other reply above:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064757#46069546
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the difference between what you expected and what you observed. I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.
You don't just have to self-host, they offer a hosted version that's far more reasonably priced than Figma[1].
Their free tier supports up to 8 members, limited to 10GB of storage.
The next tier supports unlimited members, and is price-capped at $175 a month, but is limited to 25GB of storage.
The final tier is price-capped at $950 a month, with unlimited storage.
[1] https://penpot.app/pricing
For now. Mattermost too used to be cheaper than Slack, and Gitlab too used to be cheaper than GitHub. I know the story, "look we did X, the open-source Y" and two years in you now have two versions, the free and the "enterprise" one with exclusive features.
Mattermost is nice but I lost some respect for them for a couple reasons:
1. Slightly worse product than Slack (if just for lack of connect) yet they're charging more for the cheapest license.
2. Gating reasonable OAuth support behind the paid version is crippleware
IMO they're gonna get forked, and they'll deserve it.
What would be a better way to fund large-scale open source projects in your opinion?
Please don’t say donations because that doesn’t work for something as complex as the projects you mentioned
Edit: ok there are some where it works like Blender - no idea how they do it though…
There are multiple models:
1. Like Sentry - open source all the features, provide the cloud (hosted) version. Most businesses don't want to self-host, but want a bit cheaper alternative
2. Paid tier, buy once - own forever with 1 year update support. Later you can charge lower price to extend the update cycle.
3. Blender model - donations. Very hard to get it right.
4. Laravel/Next.js model - Open source the tooling, monetize the platform
The open core model is fine, but your community edition should be a reasonably complete product. Gitlab is a good example of this. They're not selling access, they're selling convenience.
The features that differentiate to enterprise customers don't matter to small shops anyhow: policy compliance, monitoring, fancy reporting, fine grained access control,etc. Give away tools that are useful for individuals and small teams, and charge for the features that are large team/enterprise related.
> unlimited storage
Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.
It's a little like "unlimited holidays". If you turn up on day 1 and then say "Right, I'm off on my unlimited holidays! See you never!" and disappeared, they would stop paying you. There is an implicit fair use clause in all unlimited offers - I know a guy who pushed back on "unlimited holidays" because he didn't want to get penalised in performance reviews and it turns out that in his UK-based org it was 29 days a year, or one day more than the legal statutory minimum.
Firms like penpot are basically saying "look, if you pay us this much, we're not going to put hard quotas on you, just get on with it", but if you then try storing backups of annas archive on it, they are probably going to suggest that you are not operating within the spirit of the agreement, even if you're within the letter of it: fair use will apply.
Some people like to know where they stand. They want hard quotas. So fine, ask them for hard quotas. Ask for the fair use clause and understand it.
Most of us know what it means (it's a soft quota with fair use limitations), and are happy with not abusing the tier and having a bit more freedom, though.
Hah. I'm a self employed freelancer, but a friend works for (MegaCorp Intl) and every time we go for beers he mentions that he has "Unlimited Paid Time Off". But whenever I ask if that means he could take a few months to hike the Andes with me, he says.... well, no, actually they'd fire him if he took too much time. How much is too much? I ask. Well basically anything that would make them notice his absence, apparently.
And there's a problem in the other direction too - I don't expect people who really can leave for a few months without their absence being noticable to have much job security.
This is a corporate culture thing. I can be in the middle of nowhere for months, and it makes no difference to my clients. No one even notices. I have a phone that always rings, and laptop. I don't have a corporate health plan or a 401k but I don't have to ask permission..
But if you are still reachable you aren’t on time off… I also work remotely from anywhere; doesn’t mean I’m constantly on vacation
The issue is that if storage is too cheap, people will inevitably mine filecoin on it. Additionally, promising "unlimited storage" and not holding that promise might be a legal liability.
I laughed but also hate the fact that the world needs to worry about "file coin" ruining it for us.
Tbh if it wasn’t crypto it would be something else - people always find a way. Tragedy of the commons or something like that
It likely is as it is not general purpose storage.
Even though your Linux iso's are called "images", they can not be added to a penpot design file - sorry to say.
Can penpot import images? Given enough time, anything that can store PNG will become an automated backup backend
Does it really matter if in real-world-use 99% of the users never hit any limit? And I cannot blame anyone to use "unlimited" instead of "fair use, with reasonably large limits so that you will (probably) never see any restrictions in your use of the product"
HN users want to know if you're allowed to host the whole Internet on it.
Creative people could start encoding terabytes of movies inside of Penpot documents.
This is why we can't have nice things.
People see 'unlimited' and will do everything in their power to 'fact-check' it, forcing the producer to place a 'hard cap' and making everyone's life worse.
Don’t use the unlimited lie then, I assume.
"starbucks says there is no limit on how many napkins I can use but they got mad when I took the whole container, liars"
It might have become socially acceptable to lie when everyone else is, but it is still a lie. Back in my days, you at least had to put an asterisk behind such outrageous claims.
It's not a lie if no one is abusing it.
Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.
Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.
Things would be so much easier if there weren’t a super small minority of extremely greedy rich and powerful people who ruin it for everyone…
Alas we decided collectively that money trumps(sic) everything so low trust society is the natural consequence of this.
At its core it’s a spiritual problem. Capitalism is cool but making it a religion has its trade offs.
I understand that, but the phrasing is just wrong. Unlimited is unlimited. Otherwise it’s just doublespeak.
If there is a limit then it isn't unlimited. That's what the word unlimited means.
Either it is unlimited or it is not. If you call something unlimited then there should not be a limit. You cant abuse it, it's unlimited. There is no limit, so you can never go beyond the limit which means you can never abuse it.
That's what unlimited means. If you mean something else then use a different word.
> It's not a lie if no one is abusing it.
It absolutely is a lie, but you might live in a society where constant lying has been normalized. Personally, I believe that society would be better off if companies were held to the letter of their words.
Because that’s not a lie; under special circumstances, it can be true.
For example, consider a restaurant that offers free rice refills because Asian people love eating rice to fill up. An employee working overtime who really needs it can get as many refills as they want.
Of course, this system falls apart if everyone starts doing it, as the restaurant would need to bake that cost into the price to sustain the business.
But my point is: you can have nice things in society, or you can have a dystopia where people take advantage of each other at every single opportunity.
The choice is yours.
A dystopia is where people lie about free rice bowls to get people in the door but can't deliver. That's not nice things its taking advantage of a lie and blaming people who take up the offer.
read again, its not lie
its like giving up your seat when there is pregnant woman on the train
if you really need it then its okay, but I know why you don't believe this because its hard to have this policy in US where everyone weight 200 lbs
Someone will abuse it though, so why bother with the bullshit
You don't build high trust societies with lies
"You don't build high trust societies with lies"
Yes because you build it with trust, I trust you to not ruin this things so everyone can enjoy it
I can understand where you coming from because when I watch YT videos about people that exploit the loophole or game the system, people literally praise them for "beating the game" and this is happen mostly with US where everyone is materialistic
but my counter argument is game theory, where everyone can cooperate for betterment of your environment
Perhaps "uncapped" rather than "unlimited" would be a better term for us to start using
I would say it's the opposite. If there is moral compass and we don't get high-up if someone tries to store their Linux isos on pen pot and gets a ban.
Also, when it comes to UI elements this is my go to vector editor. Keeps things simple, has good ways of handling units and layout. A pleasure designing custom icons, or quick graphical elements. Plus a great export system to keep things organized.
There are many things you can do besides full app flows, it doesn't dictate how you use it. Really reminds me of early Sketch and how productive I was with it. Its wild that this is open source.
It is my go-to vector editor as well. But a large pain point is that text elements cannot be vectorized or converted to paths or shapes. So your designs cannot be exported meaningfully because there is no guarantee that the receiving end will have the same fonts you designed with.
Exporting to svg may look completely different when opened elsewhere if your designs have any text elements.
Unstable, very crash prone with just a few users designing 10 plus pages. And a huge memory hog too.
I run it on Dedicated server with 64GB Ram , it starts to lag as soon as a 5-6 pages and memory 20GB, lagging out the whole team and then crashes.
Figma is a huge memory hog, too...
Figma has become absolutely shocking in the past few years. The performance is so bad these days. It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document. I’ve seen Figma documents with hundreds of screens.
> It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document
That’s how these tools encourage you to use them. If the tool crumbles under its own usage modalities, that’s because it’s poorly designed, not the user’s fault.
You don't need to split into multiple files to make large documents manageable, multiple pages works just fine (pages you're not using aren't loaded). But even still, I have absolutely massive pages with ~100 screens on them that work just fine on this base-tier M2 MBA.
Honestly given the complexity of the screens involved I feel Figma's performance is pretty reasonable. (Now, library publish and update - that's still unreasonably slow IMO)
I'm sure if the original developer bothered to show up again he could fix it in a weekend.
> very crash prone
> And a huge memory hog
On the server side or the frontend side?
For folks who want a stand-alone desktop release:
https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases
That's a pity:
> Penpot Desktop loads the Penpot web application like a browser does. For offline use, the built-in local instance creator can set up and run a local Penpot instance via Docker (per the official self‑hosting guide).
Came here to complain about the same. I downloaded the app, but it needs an online account. What's the whole purpose of making it open source and downloadable, if it doesn't work offline?
The self hosted version needs an account outside your network?
Apparently.
I'm stuck at waiting for a confirmation e-mail.
It’s indeed a reasonably usable tool. Gets very slow with large canvases though, so don’t put everything into a single canvas.
I tried Motiff and penpot, to be framk Motif was way superior than both figma and penpot in terms of rendering and performance with large design files. unfortunately they shutdown due to lawsuits. Went back to figma.
I think Figma stole the grid layout idea from penpot, but it’s common in software to do that
Penpot took it from CSS.
Why don’t they provide a desktop version, similar to software such as GIMP, Inkscape, and others? Do they believe they cannot achieve the desired revenue through crowdfunding? Many projects—most notably Blender—have been highly successful using this approach. It seems unreasonable that an average designer should be required to learn server administration
I am not sure what you are really asking here. They have almost 20k commits of frontend and server code [0] over half a decade of development. What would a desktop version of this look like outside of a bundled Tauri/Electron wrapper?
[0]: https://github.com/penpot/penpot
I am not a software developer. There are many people who think like me...
There is in fact an effort to make a desktop application!
Source (& releases): https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop
Topic on penpot forum: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...
I am referring to the convenience of being able to download it from the store and start using it immediately. If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users
https://penpot.app/ you don't have to download it at all :)
Thanks for the information, but I was talking about the advantage of local usability.
The closest analogy would be Sketch for macOS, which Figma simply copied at first, and then mostly replaced. I would love to see open source Sketch for open source systems.
You mean which Figma replaced in the market, because they were not limited to a native app?
This is imo a cautionary tale that being a native app primarily is a bad idea in this year.
From the user perspective Figma is great, and I might say it’s even better. However, all that came from throwing more money into the problem, I believe. Figma just won because they invested unlimited money into this, while Sketch might be self-funding, if I’m correct here. To me this is rather ‘money is a very nice asset to have’ kind of thing.
Figma has set an expectation for designers that their projects support multi-user editing by default and are available to clients, teammates and stakeholders without having to install anything. Its hard to go against that kind of productivity in any org.
Penpot provides the same.
First discussed here 3 years ago:
Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262
1145 points, 128 comments
Have been self-hosting this on Docker/Portainer for several weeks for a few people. Works fine so far.
I tried to self host penpot a few months ago but the app would crash after a few minutes and not properly show the canvases. So a no for me
They seem to update very frequently; I don't know if it still crashes now — I'm planning to try it myself.
What i tested happned 5 months ago. if the issue exist 1 month ago too it is the same problem.
The problem lies with the whole thing is XML and SVG unlike Figma's Canvas/WebASM . The whole thing is unable to scale.
They are actually working on a new canvas-based rendering engine in order to get away from using the DOM so that should help performance quite a bit.
https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...
I dunno if I can move to a design platform that doesn't have a silly name. It'd ruin the joy I get every day when I open it.
I feel like we are in a godlden age of foss tools that are reasonably competitive with existing proprietary incumbants.
I'm going to try to run an instance for my local creative community. If everyone chips in server costs and donation, then it would be huge savings for everyone.
Penpot has been invaluable! A very nice system and team. 'On prem' Figma has a lot of unique possibilities.
Lunacy is amazing for me. Very fast and intuitive.
Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.
https://icons8.com/lunacy
Not open source however
Thank you both, had no idea about existence of lunacy (the app).
It's amazing how the design world in my experience loves to use closed-source software, Figma first. The chiasm with the dev world is huge. Penpot's cool in this perspective.
In many industries, you want to use a mix of (a) the best tools available for the job, and (b) what everybody else in the same industry uses.
Open vs. closed source is a secondary consideration outside tech circles, and often within.
So, Java instead of wasm, but open source. While LogSeq is an open source copycat (not really) of Obsidian, I simply can’t stand it. I have tried Penpot a couple of years back, so cannot say anything about it, with the exception that I noticed it’s Clojure. Would love to learn more if someone can comment on that. I guess I’m biased against Java, but I’m not experienced with it, so I may be very wrong on that one. Of course having an open-source Figma around feels empowering, so much it is ingrained into the current dev process.
Penpot is also implemented in Clojure/ClojureScript. ClojureScript is a Clojure Dialect which compiles down to JavaScript. So there is no Java involved on the frontend :)
Perhaps my bad. I just don’t know Clojure at all, and honestly it might be the first time I’m seeing it, hence the mistake. My quick search prior to my posting returned this:
>Clojure is a dynamic and functional dialect of the programming language Lisp on the Java platform.
So I thought this is built on Java, or like that. I’d love if someone could explain it in simple terms, as I’d love to drop the ‘Java = bad’ attitude. It’s just that my prior experience taught me to stay away from Java.
There are a few things to unpack here. Clojure is a lisp hosted on the Java virtual machine (JVM). Subsequently, someone created Clojurescript which is an implementation (of the vast majority of) Clojure that compiles to JavaScript. The majority of Clojure code can run on either.
“Java = bad” is also something that you should probably drop. The JVM in particular is a very robust host and there’s a large ecosystem for it. Java the language has also improved over the years, but the JVM is great (and has a large market share as a result).
At least the linked repository contains 0% Java.
Clojure 79.2%
JavaScript 7.2%
SCSS 6.0%
Rust 4.7%
HTML 1.4%
Shell 0.4%
Other 1.1%
They are referring the Clojure, which is hosted on the JVM.
Clojure huh???? never see that outside financial system
https://pitch.com/ is also a huge Clojure visual app. They build UIX [0] which is a really nice interface to React.
[0]: https://github.com/pitch-io/uix
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I was immediately drawn to the emoji in the commit message titles.
I love this team. It's so endearing.
While I agree, I'm not sure it's a team, it looks like mostly one dude :)
Thats Clojure...one person can look like a whole team ;)
couldn't help being cheeky...actually there are quite a few contributors.
Yeah, finally some lisp!
Penpot is a startup that raised $12M a few years back:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/02/penpot-the-open-source-pla...
I'm seeing several contributors: https://github.com/penpot/penpot/graphs/contributors
Figma is also one dude.
1.65k employees according to Wikipedia.
Do you support MCP? I really want to be able to do conversation-based UI design!
With the integration of AI, people are using Figma for more than just design.
A recent use-case that a friend was gushing about:
- Input notes, data into Figma and ask its AI to summarize it into presentation worthy slides with built-in games to keep meeting members engaged, and host them to a website.