I just wish designers were more familiar with the SVG format and its caveats. Several times I've wanted to do some quick change in an SVG that was exported from Adobe Whatever and Inkscape was incapable of rendering it correctly, if at all. I'm pretty sure Adobe has been pushing the boundaries of SVG in the last years, while other tools stick to the basics.

By "pushing the boundaries" do you mean "violating SVG standards" or is it the other editors who aren't keeping up with SVG2.0 etc?

The last I heard there wasn't a single rendering engine that passes the entire W3C test suite, let alone any two renderers that have the same coverage. I'm not sure if that is still the case.

In my experience using SVG for portability is a minefield.

yup. resvg is the best atm i think.

If Adobe changes the spec, they can, simply by being the market leader (bit like Chrome is)

Not nice, but there you have it. It would be great if there was an Adobe SVG format in those cases perhaps.

And Adobe was the one to sink the SVG 1.2... because of Inkscape

I'm not familiar with what you are referring to. Could you point me towards more information or discussion?

I also had some issues with SVG exports from Inkscape not being drawn correctly when used as toolbar icons for Windows apps.

The solution was Affinity Designer. Too bad, but at least it's an easy purchase rather than a subscription.

Affinity Designer is a great tool for those of us willing to use commercial/non-free software (and who hate Adobe). It's relatively inexpensive, and the company tries very hard to make users happy. I've used it for numerous projects requiring vector output, ranging from bespoke posters to feeding the laser cutter. It will output a lot of formats, but in combination with Inkscape, you can convert the output to pretty much anything you would need.

Inkscape saves with two different options: "Inkscape SVG" and "Plain SVG", did you try both?

They shouldn't really matter, except for file size. They won't magically use different SVG markup. All Plain SVG does is strip away Inkscape's XML namespaces and custom attributes/elements. There's a fair number of SVG features that are poorly-supported, broken or with a number of gotchas in various renderers, however and you're kinda expected to work around those yourself.

For icons and similar you can often go back to the most basic things: Filled paths with solid colors and gradients. That should render pretty much everywhere where there's at least some SVG support.

This is the opposite of reality for SVG.

Inkscape is the only tool pushing the SVG standard forward right now. Mesh gradients, SVG2.0 text flow, and much more besides. None of it supported by Adobe, Chrome, Firefox or librsvg. Only found in Inkscape and it's not like Inkscape broke the standards, we went to the w3c and got involved in setting the spec and then implemented it.

If you have broken svg files, report them to https://inkscape.org/report

For me it's the opposite. Things just are so much harder than they need to be. Rotating and moving stuff ends up with lots of transforms in the svg. Copying something in from another file wreaks havoc if both files used classes to style things. So many surprises all the time. I want to like it and Gimp, but end up with paid options every time.

Maybe you are more of a power user. Also I'm not concerned with the SVG output, as long as it does not take ages to render.

Have you considered paying for Inkscape instead ;-)

I mostly agree, though for me it's 'winget install inkscape' right now :-)

I've never heard of Winget. Is MS offering a first-party alternative to Chocolatey now?

Yes: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/