How we tested...

All our editors were tested on the same quad-core machine with 8GB of RAM, running a recent version of the Ubuntu-based elementary OS. (Note that don’t need a special distro for coping with vector graphics – you can happily use your usual preferred distribution.)

To level the playing field, special attention was paid to the 2D performance of our test machine. To minimise any system variables, we decided to use an Intel HD Graphics chip, one of a family known to offer stability, decent if not spectacular performance, and a hassle-free driver experience in Linux.

We tested one program at a time under standard conditions. We tried to select the latest stable version of each application and assessed it for usability, performance, breadth of feature set, and for the extra materials available on the web.