As a devout supporter of Ukraine, I'm not sure it's fair to denounce the FOSS version of the app just because it was built by developers that reside in Russia. We all know that the company outwardly stating "we are against the invasion of Ukraine" wouldn't end well for them, and as long as you're not paying for it, I don't see a huge difference using this vs. your average American software (in which the developers also reside in a country with questionable government leadership). Enlighten me if I'm wrong though

I stopped using it more for technical reasons but when I was using it I installed it as a flatpak and removed network access.

The people of a country are not members of that country's ruling regime. It makes no logical sense to say that one cannot trust open source software from Russia merely for it being Russian in origin. Not all people in the USA are CIA, and not all Russians are FSB.

Are the people of the USA responsible for everything the US government does? Is every single person living in China responsible for the actions of the CCP? Is every single Russian personally responsible for everything that Putin does?

This is honestly news to me. I had no idea.

When I tried it last, it was painfully slow. Have there been any improvements on the performance front lately?

Typing in a word processor should not have input lag in 2025. It wasn't just a little lag, but the type and watch it catch up kind of lag.

Could you be more specific?

It looks like a 2015 wordpress template

Looking at what they did to commercial software that used to have excellent, high density UIs, maybe they should stay where they are.

A lot of open-source doesn't have a process to integrate and follow a design strategy from a designer. A business can mandate that work be done to adapt/follow a given design strategy... for open-source it's often harder to do so... and even then you face the same or more resistance to change.

It took basically a corporate control for Audacity to make its' difficult transition to a better design from its' mediocre one. That said, I'd love to see something modern transformed from The Gimp's core in a similar way. That doesn't even begin to cover what you might want in terms of inter-app collaboration...

KdenLive, Blender, Gimp, Krita, InkScape, Audacity and other tooling, as an example, all use different UI/UX base libraries, and no clean way to cross-integrate features between them if someone wanted to assemble an open-source Adobe alternative. There's no baseline equivalent to even MS/Office's use of COM/DCOM for interoperability.

For the past week or so I’ve been using pencil.dev and I’m impressed. It’s like a local Figma that connects to Claude code or cursor, and you can just ask it to design stuff

It definitely has its bugs and it eats up tokens/context like crazy. But it make product development so much easier and faster, while providing great design