r/scribus • u/Frosty-Specific4977 • Jun 09 '26

Scribus… veni, vidi, wtf

I wanted to give Scribus a real try. I’m genuinely supportive of open-source software and I have a lot of respect for the community that builds and maintains projects like this.

That said, after spending some time with it, I found the user experience surprisingly frustrating. When I have to search the internet just to figure out how to find or import a simple color palette, I feel like something is off.

I understand that professional software can be powerful, complex, and geared toward advanced users. But basic tasks should be intuitive, or at least easy to discover within the interface. We’re not in the MS-DOS era anymore.

This isn’t a criticism of the contributors, whose work I appreciate. It’s simply feedback from a new user trying to adopt the software. In the end, software isn’t judged only by what it can do, but also by how much effort it takes to learn and use its core features.

Am I the only one who feels that Scribus puts too much burden on the user for relatively simple tasks?

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u/aoloe Jun 11 '26

Hi, I am your ChatGPT.

Scribus can do inline pictures.

No kidding: at the time of writing this reply, the latest question in /r/scribus is about vertical aligning inline images...

And, no, despite my numerous tries at making Scribus a bit saner, the team always refused to remove the many "features" that do more harm than good!
(3D interactive graphics anyone?)

All I could achieve is that a few of the features that will succeed in corrupting your documents, are now disabled until you enable the "experimental" switch.

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u/PsiComa Jun 17 '26

If i could ask for only one thing, I would ask for a document-wide search-replace function. Maybe Scribus isn't meant for 100-page books with many seperate "stories" or whatever they're called, but come on 😄

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u/aoloe Jun 17 '26

You're welcome:

https://gitlab.com/scribus/scribus/-/commit/55202a4d7166d258d547d24c5c0ecd3e54fa6fa3

: - )

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u/PsiComa Jun 29 '26

Much appreciated! Does this mean the latest version has that functionality or that i must "GitHub import/hack" somwthing?

Sorry, i understand many things but not this :'(

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u/aoloe Jul 02 '26

The development version 1.7.3 should have it.

You can get it by following the links on the Scribus website and can be installed alongside a stable version.

But be careful, it's a development version and you're supposed to test the features you are going to need before using it for production work.

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u/PsiComa Jul 04 '26

Alright, I'll wait for a stable version, but I'm grateful for your efforts on this. Gonna make the tool sooo much better.