Scribus

Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2016–2026), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with Scribus, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 17 complaints

Scribus UI is giving the commenter headaches, hard to work with2026-04-05
Chosen display backend is silently reset, so the user thinks their override isn't working2025-09-14
Simply pasting an image into the app is not straightforward, and it is hard to fit text to custom shapes2025-07-11
Has always been fairly clunky to use2025-03-03
View doesn't auto-update when the font is changed2024-07-20
Hard to use and slow on a modest document2024-01-31
UI is non-intuitive unless used regularly, requiring learning workarounds for quirks2022-05-17
Pressing return in a text box switches font back to default2022-04-06
Can't change multiple text boxes at once; formatting resets when retyping; page sticks to screen edge2022-04-06
Putting text into a designed page layout is an absolute nightmare2022-04-06
Text input is convoluted and not WYSIWYG, so users can't see how text flows2020-02-10
Triple-click and double-click-drag text selection don't work, unlike other software2019-12-29
Scribus is not intuitive to use2019-11-30
Can't edit text on the page directly; must use a modal dialogue, and font editing is awkward2019-11-30
UI lacks dockable panels and some tasks are far easier by keyboard than mouse2019-11-30
Can't figure out how to set kerning and tracking on text2017-01-09
Slow and unable to handle large files2016-08-18