[HN Gopher] Penpot: The Open-Source Figma
___________________________________________________________________
Penpot: The Open-Source Figma
Author : selvan
Score : 665 points
Date : 2025-11-27 02:14 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| b3ing wrote:
| I think Figma stole the grid layout idea from penpot, but it's
| common in software to do that
| simulo wrote:
| Penpot took it from CSS.
| echelon wrote:
| I was immediately drawn to the emoji in the commit message
| titles.
|
| I love this team. It's so endearing.
| tyleo wrote:
| While I agree, I'm not sure it's a team, it looks like mostly
| one dude :)
| jhancock wrote:
| Thats Clojure...one person can look like a whole team ;)
|
| couldn't help being cheeky...actually there are quite a few
| contributors.
| douchescript wrote:
| Yeah, finally some lisp!
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I'm seeing several contributors:
| https://github.com/penpot/penpot/graphs/contributors
| pavlov wrote:
| Penpot is a startup that raised $12M a few years back:
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/02/penpot-the-open-source-
| pla...
| okhobb wrote:
| Figma is also one dude.
| kekub wrote:
| 1.65k employees according to Wikipedia.
| Myzel394 wrote:
| 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
| zonghao wrote:
| They seem to update very frequently; I don't know if it still
| crashes now -- I'm planning to try it myself.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| 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.
| IseardMi wrote:
| 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...
| WillAdams wrote:
| For folks who want a stand-alone desktop release:
|
| https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| 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).
| seu wrote:
| 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?
| Mashimo wrote:
| The self hosted version needs an account outside your
| network?
| WillAdams wrote:
| Apparently.
|
| I'm stuck at waiting for a confirmation e-mail.
| noahjk wrote:
| PENPOT_FLAGS=disable-email-verification
| WillAdams wrote:
| Which file needs that?
| viraptor wrote:
| That sounds like an environment variable to set when you
| start it.
| WillAdams wrote:
| That was it.
|
| I'm in!
|
| Thanks!
| franga2000 wrote:
| > built-in local instance creator
| v3ss0n wrote:
| 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.
| shakna wrote:
| Figma is a huge memory hog, too...
| mitemte wrote:
| 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.
| okhobb wrote:
| I'm sure if the original developer bothered to show up
| again he could fix it in a weekend.
| gyomu wrote:
| _> 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.
| 542458 wrote:
| 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)
| SoKamil wrote:
| > very crash prone
|
| > And a huge memory hog
|
| On the server side or the frontend side?
| vsviridov wrote:
| Have been self-hosting this on Docker/Portainer for several weeks
| for a few people. Works fine so far.
| Alupis wrote:
| 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
| poly2it wrote:
| > unlimited storage
|
| Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't
| be as common in the industry.
| walski wrote:
| 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"
| okhobb wrote:
| HN users want to know if you're allowed to host the whole
| Internet on it.
| reddalo wrote:
| Creative people could start encoding terabytes of movies
| inside of Penpot documents.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| 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.
| wltr wrote:
| Don't use the unlimited lie then, I assume.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| 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.
| threeducks wrote:
| > 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.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| 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
| twelvedogs wrote:
| Someone will abuse it though, so why bother with the
| bullshit
|
| You don't build high trust societies with lies
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "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
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| In my experience the SaaS unlimited abusers often aren't
| even trying to do capitalism things. They're just abusing
| the systems for the thrill of it.
|
| They go on Reddit and brag and compete about doing
| useless things to store files on these services, like a
| competition. They're bragging on HN about GitHub tools
| that force files into a non-file service and have rate
| limiters tuned to upload right at the server's rate
| limit.
|
| It's not capitalism, it's people thinking they're winning
| points against capitalism by abusing a corporation. Even
| if that corporation is a small startup trying to offer a
| product on a small budget.
| sfn42 wrote:
| 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.
| wltr wrote:
| I understand that, but the phrasing is just wrong.
| Unlimited is unlimited. Otherwise it's just doublespeak.
| mnx wrote:
| "starbucks says there is no limit on how many napkins I
| can use but they got mad when I took the whole container,
| liars"
| threeducks wrote:
| 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.
| wltr wrote:
| Heck, adding a word like 'almost' would make it rather
| truth.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Can confirm. Worked at a startup with some very generous
| (though not "unlimited") limits designed to allow for
| bursts and spikes of usage.
|
| Some people took it upon themselves to try to abuse and
| saturate the limits to "prove" that we couldn't handle
| it.
|
| We could actually handle it, but it wasn't worth offering
| it to this small number of users who were trying to prove
| a point by abusing it to the max without an actual use
| case. They just wanted to show off on Reddit that the
| were making our servers suffer.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| 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.
| kuschku wrote:
| Can penpot import images? Given enough time, anything that
| can store PNG will become an automated backup backend
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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..
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| 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
| Aurornis wrote:
| Every company is different. I've had the "unlimited time
| off" company where the _CEO_ would go after anyone who
| took a week or more.
|
| I've also had the unlimited time off company where I took
| an actual month off and it was fine because I got my work
| done.
| poly2it wrote:
| 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.
| written-beyond wrote:
| I laughed but also hate the fact that the world needs to
| worry about "file coin" ruining it for us.
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| Tbh if it wasn't crypto it would be something else -
| people always find a way. Tragedy of the commons or
| something like that
| chrisbuc wrote:
| Perhaps "uncapped" rather than "unlimited" would be a better
| term for us to start using
| BoredPositron wrote:
| 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.
| hk__2 wrote:
| 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.
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| 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...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| 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.
| Tostino wrote:
| You're naive if you think those don't affect small shops.
|
| If you want to do enterprise software, even as a small
| shop, things like requiring pull request approvals is an
| absolute must.
|
| Our customers demand it.
|
| Doesn't matter how many employees we have, or how
| profitable we are. If we want to sell software to most
| large CPG companies, this stuff is non-negotiable.
|
| So I just use GitHub.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The workflow I like in Gitlab is protected branches. This
| lets you go fast on a dev trunk then pull changes over
| intentionally.
| mirzap wrote:
| 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
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Sentry isn't open source, it's source available.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > What would be a better way to fund large-scale open
| source projects in your opinion?
|
| Same price for same core feature set would be a good start.
| Or lower price for smaller feature set.
|
| Having a premium price for a reduced product means your
| target audience is limited to people willing to pay a
| premium for a lesser product to support open source. There
| are some groups willing to do this, but most simply want a
| tool that does the job without adding too much to their
| already huge SaaS budget.
|
| I'm extremely sensitive to core workflow tools for a
| company these days. It only takes a few days of lost work
| because some tool corrupted your design or the engineers
| have to spend a few days working around an issue in a tool
| to make the effective cost of using that tool extremely
| high.
|
| Engineering time is expensive. If a tool that costs $20 per
| person per month causes even one issue per month that
| potentially produces hours of work and rework (like the
| spontaneously resizing element a commenter above noted)
| then the true cost is going to be in the hundreds or
| thousands of dollars per month in lost productivity.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Blender did it by facing the industry going cutting edge
| for a decade or more. They somehow found enough donation to
| keep the thing as indie would support it just enough. Today
| blender is arguably better than industry standards, they
| just have to face the marketing wave but like Wikipedia
| probably got plenty of support.
|
| These are the rare examples of Linux going through the
| torrent, typically emerges as proud victorious, with
| reasonably low profile
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| 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.
| Alupis wrote:
| That's the beauty of the open source, self-hosted option
| then, no? If they radically change pricing one day, pick up
| your ball and self-host without any limits.
| hju22_-3 wrote:
| And that's exactly why they don't do radical changes,
| because people hate those. They do slow, small and
| insidious changes over a long time period. And then it
| isn't as easy to simply "pick up your ball" and be on your
| way.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| 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.
| rubenvanwyk wrote:
| What? That's crazy.
| nullzzz wrote:
| It's indeed a reasonably usable tool. Gets very slow with large
| canvases though, so don't put everything into a single canvas.
| boriskourt wrote:
| Penpot has been invaluable! A very nice system and team. 'On
| prem' Figma has a lot of unique possibilities.
| aedis wrote:
| Lunacy is amazing for me. Very fast and intuitive.
|
| Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.
| rc1 wrote:
| https://icons8.com/lunacy
|
| Not open source however
| barrenko wrote:
| Thank you both, had no idea about existence of lunacy (the
| app).
| rubenvanwyk wrote:
| I found out about Lunacy because it uses AvaloniaUI; have been
| a fan of it so far.
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| First discussed here 3 years ago:
|
| _Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262
|
| 1145 points, 128 comments
| cyberax wrote:
| Do you support MCP? I really want to be able to do conversation-
| based UI design!
| lejalv wrote:
| https://github.com/penpot/penpot-mcp
| boriskourt wrote:
| 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.
| arcastroe wrote:
| 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.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Clojure huh???? never see that outside financial system
| boriskourt wrote:
| 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
| comezkandirali wrote:
| 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
| wltr wrote:
| 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.
| Valodim wrote:
| 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.
| wltr wrote:
| 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.
| mattkevan wrote:
| Very different strategies. Sketch has been self-funding
| and sustainable from day 1. They have had 20m funding
| recently, but a fraction of Figma's 749m.
|
| Figma lost over 1bn in Q3 on revenues of 274m. Share
| price is down 70% from IPO 3 months ago.
|
| It's also clear from Figma's latest product releases - a
| grab bag of unfinished AI tools and a laughably shoddy
| website builder - that their primary audience is
| investors and not end users. I don't think the market of
| product designers is large enough to support their
| valuation and have any hope of making a decent return
| unless they diversify rapidly into other areas and try to
| become the next Adobe. Meanwhile Canva and more AI native
| tools are busy biting at their heels.
|
| Speaking as a daily user, I hope they stay around long-
| term and don't enshittify themselves too much. But I'm
| not optimistic.
| boriskourt wrote:
| 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.
| wltr wrote:
| I'm actually surprised it delivers on the promise. Last
| time I checked it a couple of years back, it was nowhere
| near.
| b3ing wrote:
| Sketch copied Fireworks, which Adobe abandoned after buying
| out Macromedia. I knew XD would fail, which is funny because
| Adobe had the best UI tool but didn't know what to do with
| it.
|
| They still are really clueless, Animate has had hardly any
| updates in 13yrs, yet other animation tools offer a lot of
| innovative features.
| sodimel wrote:
| 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...
| comezkandirali wrote:
| 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
| boriskourt wrote:
| https://penpot.app/ you don't have to download it at all :)
| comezkandirali wrote:
| Thanks for the information, but I was talking about the
| advantage of local usability.
| franga2000 wrote:
| > If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach
| a much larger number of users
|
| Almost certainly not. If you need this kind of tool, you'll
| either self-host it, use the hosted version or use Figma.
| There are no comparable offline-only alternatives. What
| users are they using exactly?
| boriskourt wrote:
| 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
| comezkandirali wrote:
| I am not a software developer. There are many people who
| think like me...
| wltr wrote:
| 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.
| nuriaion wrote:
| 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 :)
| wltr wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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).
| Mashimo wrote:
| 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%
| Antibabelic wrote:
| They are referring the Clojure, which is hosted on the JVM.
| maelito wrote:
| 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.
| kleiba wrote:
| 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.
| closingreunion wrote:
| 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.
| supermatt wrote:
| 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 :(
| cirelli94 wrote:
| I think you should post a issue at this point D:
| supermatt wrote:
| I raised the issue in the forums at the time, with video
| captures demonstrating the issue(s).
| ogrisel wrote:
| 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.
| supermatt wrote:
| 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
| ogrisel wrote:
| 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.
| supermatt wrote:
| > This is why it's important to describe explicitly
|
| That is a fair point. I will take it on board when giving
| people screenshots and videos of bugs in future.
|
| > I did not see the change in button width
|
| There's actually a lot more visual changes than that just
| the button, but I will leave that to the reader as an
| exercise in spot-the-difference ;)
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| > There's actually a lot more visual changes than that
| just the button, but I will leave that to the reader as
| an exercise in spot-the-difference ;)
|
| This is fair. But issues like this will never get my
| attention in general because I don't have time to do this
| exercise - I would much rather have it all spelled out.
| Even if there are a bunch of related issues they won't
| get fixed in a single PR, it likely will be multiple.
|
| I guess my point is that if you really want OSS projects
| to improve, the issue submitter can't just ask the
| maintainer "figure it out". It totally works this way in
| the corporate world though (IME).
|
| Edit: I'm sorry to have jumped to conclusions. Leaving my
| comment up for accountability.
| supermatt wrote:
| I didn't ask the maintainer to "figure it out". I posted
| a thread in the forum with multiple videos to start a
| discussion.
|
| People here have stated I should have filed on GitHub,
| and because I don't want to link my GitHub to this
| account I suggested someone else do it.
|
| That was 6 hours ago, and people are still commenting
| about my lack of a suitable report rather than actually
| reporting it correctly themselves - as is evident by the
| lack of a new issue on the github.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| I'm sorry for jumping at you like that.
| supermatt wrote:
| No problem :)
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| > I swear I did not see the change in button width before
| reading the linked comment.
|
| I didn't either! I stared at that gif for a few minutes
| and I couldn't tell what the problem is (or what to look
| for). It wasn't until you said "changing button width" I
| knew where to focus my attention.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| "Content not available in your region"
|
| So, given that Penpot appears to mostly be developed in
| the EU, you'd need to fix that part first.
| supermatt wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are referring to. If you mean the
| video link, I am in the EU and can see it.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I hate how every time someone even talks about an issue
| with an open source project, some smart alec replies
| "well did you raise an issue?" - or worse - "did you send
| a PR to fix it?".
|
| We are all very aware how bug reporting works. And user
| criticism of bugs isn't somehow invalidated just because
| the users didn't go to the sometimes very large effort to
| report bugs.
|
| I wouldn't have reported this bug either. If the example
| documents are getting corrupted just by navigating them
| that indicates that it's just a really buggy project
| (corroborated by other comments here) that I'm not even
| going to use, so why would I spend my time working on it?
| theultdev wrote:
| I can see both sides of the dilemma and I don't
| necessarily like when a maintainer defaults to "open a
| PR" but asking for a reproducible issue wherever
| requested is not too much to ask.
|
| With a PR I understand not wanting to put the effort in
| as it may not be merged. But offering up a reproducible
| example on the correct forum is the least you could do.
| If you want the problem fixed that's the best way
| forward.
| supermatt wrote:
| > offering up a reproducible example on the correct forum
| is the least you could do
|
| I suggested someone do that 8 hrs ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069471
|
| So far no takers. Just people saying what they would do
| instead of actually doing it :)
| yuters wrote:
| 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.
| supermatt wrote:
| > 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
| dallen33 wrote:
| Genuinely asking - what's the issue? I don't see it.
| supermatt wrote:
| I click to navigate to the "Examples" page (I am
| gesturing with my mouse to circle around a 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. For example, the button has changed to half the
| original width.
| morcus wrote:
| It's that very bottom button you're referring to, right?
| supermatt wrote:
| Thats the one I specifically mention, sure, but there are
| many more changes to the page overall if you compare the
| before and after.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Unrelated but imgur is basically malware at this point. I
| had to click through so many layers of nagging popups
| (including a "don't support us" button, then a severely
| low-contrast "view in safari" button on a dialog explicitly
| designed to get me to accidentally click the app link),
| then when I finally got to your picture, any sort of
| interaction with the page whatsoever, including pinch-
| zooming to see the image, just took me away to a different
| page altogether.
|
| I sincerely hate imgur and hope the whole site goes
| bankrupt, and I can't stand it when anyone links to them.
| supermatt wrote:
| Can you suggest a low-effort alternative I can use in
| future?
| dugidugout wrote:
| https://catbox.moe/
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah can't see that lasting. I wish someone would make
| one with _limited_ adverts that just pays for the hosting
| and moderation costs. How hard can it be?
| culi wrote:
| https://alternativeto.net/software/imgur/
|
| Here's a comparison of alternatives
| fnord77 wrote:
| strange, I got no pop ups at all
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| Yeah, imgur had very simple & humble origins and fostered
| a surprisingly active, reddit-like community (though I'm
| sure imgurians would resent that particular comparison),
| and then holy shit it just turned into a bizarrely
| bloated overstuffed hodgepodge of fire-garbage. I just
| looked at the homepage for the first time in forever and
| --wait, what? "Arcade"?
|
| Bleh.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Also it's not accessible in the UK without workarounds
| that I'm not going to bother with for that dumpster fire
| of a site.
| sergiogjr wrote:
| I'm glad that at times like these, I switched to Brave
| browser on all of my platforms (desktop and mobile). I
| can't recommend it enough.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Came with receipts lol - hopefully they can repro and fix
| this but the fact it as omitted for 8 months kind of hints
| at how little people are using it.
|
| Yeah you can really see the resize comparing the before and
| after. https://jpst.it/4KgSB
| yuters wrote:
| Wow you're right. I've tried again with the same
| wireframing kit and it happened to me too! That's
| unbelievable.
| sreekanth850 wrote:
| 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.
| lexicality wrote:
| 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.
| wildmXranat wrote:
| 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
| leo_e wrote:
| I'm willing to pay the "performance tax" of the web stack/self-
| hosting if it means my design files aren't held hostage in a
| proprietary cloud silo.
|
| Figma is fantastic software, but it has become a single point of
| failure for entire product orgs. If Penpot is "laggy" right now
| but gives me a docker-compose up guarantee that I own the
| pipeline, that's a trade-off I'll take.
|
| Performance can be optimized eventually (it's code); closed-
| source licensing terms cannot be optimized by users (it's legal).
| rtaylorgarlock wrote:
| Exactly. I'm a little interested to see if perhaps designer's
| eyes will continue to open to the power of licensing terms and
| control of their work with the whole AI conversation. The only
| designers i've heard say they care about open source are on the
| web side of design.
| elsa26 wrote:
| Do you mean you would want to self-host apps like penpot if it
| was easy to do so?
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| I want to like penpot, but on even my beefiest computers it
| causes the whole system to slow to a crawl when opening anything
| complex.
| Animats wrote:
| There's an unofficial desktop version.[1] It lags the hosted
| version quite a bit. Anyone tried it?
|
| [1] https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-
| to-1-0/72...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| For me the deciding factor is which one has access to the most
| free packages of already-designed objects (i.e., for making
| workflows, etc.). How does penpot do in that regards compared
| with Figma?
| diacritica wrote:
| Hi, Pablo from Penpot here.
|
| - New rendering engine should fix the performance issues. See
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG0U5jJtHY (older reference
| https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...)
| Open beta coming in the next few weeks, finally!
|
| - Our business model is Open Nitrate (see
| https://community.penpot.app/t/penpots-upcoming-business-mod...).
| For the impatient, think of it as a reverse open-core. The
| current pricing model for SaaS is quite straightforward. The
| "unlimited storage" for Enterprise on SaaS is fine, believe me.
|
| - This is a European startup that was founded in 2011 and pivoted
| to a product-centric actvity in 2021. We're 45 people. We believe
| open source is the right social contract. All employees use Linux
| as their operating system. Yes.
|
| - In terms of our vision of AI, I published this whitepaper in
| August https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/ If you want
| to understand how we think about Penpot, design and platforms,
| read it.
|
| - 3 months later, we can demo our MCP server capabilities here
| https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-mcp-server-showcase-as...
| but see also our internal folder with 1min clips here
| https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1CCuBqHEevWsp15bY...
| (my favourite is the flat design to design tokens and back to
| design). "design as a graph" is our ML-based applied research. We
| hope to have something cool ready at some point next year.
|
| - The whole point of building Penpot was to unite designers and
| developers. New tools and platforms can play a role. We focused
| on declarative and semantic design paradigms departing from
| imperative design paradigms.
|
| - We have 1.2M users, 25k Penpot new deployments every month, 30k
| new SaaS signups every month and a growing community of
| contributors and partners. Ironically, the early adopters are
| Fortune 500 companies knowing that a cycle is over and that they
| need to own their design assets. UI design is now as valuable as
| code, if not more.
|
| - I don't like the "Open-Source Figma" label as we're building a
| superior tool but I understand it's a nice shorcut for now :)
|
| - DM me on Linkedin if you have a couple of millions to spare :P
| dustingetz wrote:
| are you happy with ClojureScript?
| diacritica wrote:
| I'm afraid it depends on whom you ask. Some devs really like
| it, some others don't. As we move towards a more multilingual
| stack, everyone will be happy and the product will shine even
| brighter. I don't code in ClojureScript (or Clojure) so I
| can't answer directly. Here's a nice blog post though (on why
| Penpot chose Clojure) https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-
| chose-clojure-as-its-l...
|
| The new rendering engine is wasm + rust + skia, in case
| you're curious.
| mdtrooper wrote:
| Sorry (maybe fall some negative karma points to me) but I tell
| that Penpot remembers to me to YaCy
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy . When a project is awesome
| but the language made it is the worse (YaCy is made of in java,
| and PenPot Clojure).
| rnewme wrote:
| Just for curiosity, what lang would you have picked for YaCy in
| 2003, and which one for the Penpot today?
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