So how ready is Ink/Stitch for an average consumer? My mom is recently retired and embroiders occasionally. I don't think she does anything more custom than a monogram. It was only a few years ago I pulled off old designs from floppy disks. I think her current equipment accepts USB but she leans on the cloud to get designs onto the machine. She's not geeky with computers, but is competent enough to use an iPad and used MS Office sweet when she was working.

Does it sound like this is something worth introducing her to?

If she's not doing anything more complicated than monograms, I'd honestly stick with using the downloaded/custom designs. As it sounds like she's just using those she'd have to learn two things. The first being inkscape, which like any graphics program is a decent challenge to learn. Then on top of that, she'd have to learn the embroidery specifics which is another challenge. Digitizing is just a whole level above using premade designs.

It's more a replacement for Hatch/Embrilliance than for brother.com's library of designs.

Is there a recommended way of using Inkscape to make it more user friendly?

I hear so much love for Inkscape but every time I've tried to use it for laser cutting or 2d design I give up and go back to Illustrator. I feel like I'm battling Inkscape to do even the most basic things. I'm a very casual/occasional user (of either program).

I'm happy using Gimp and Blender over Photoshop and Maya/Max for my home use cases but Inkscape is defeating me.

Have you checked out Affinity Designer? I'm a near 20+ year user of Illustrator and I find Inkscape 'a bit' of a mess, but Affinity's offering, whilst paid for (but cheap), is much more honed. I can't wait 'til I can transition over to it 100% and unshackle myself from Adobe (just not quite there yet, sadly).

+1 for Affinity Designer. I actually prefer it to Illustrator because it can do both vector and raster (they call it Designer and Pixel Personas). At $55 one-time price it's very reasonable.

It's a bit like Macromedia Fireworks in that respect, if anybody else remembers that one

From what I understand, they had experienced Illustrator users in mind when designing the interface. Same with Photoshop and Affinity Photo. It seems to have paid off.

Honestly, I feel like it must be complete familiarity with Illustrator. I feel the same way about using Illustrator since I learned inkscape first.

It is phenomenal in features and flexibility, but it's not a stable application at all.

I'd sacrifice some of the million things it can do if it wouldn't crash after closing a project on macos.

I think they target Linux as the primary OS, MacOS is second class citizen, perhaps for the best.

I have pretty much the same problems on Linux, so I don't think it's an OS issue. Inkscape is one of those tools that I use often, and am very grateful for, but I usually find the actual experience of using it very painful. Regular crashes being one of the big pain points at the moment.

What distro? I use Fedora, and I use it all the time and have never had it crash.

Both Ubuntu and Pop. In fairness, I think I've got it installed on Pop via Flatpak, which is sometimes part of the problem, but that's not the case on Ubuntu.

Thank you for introducing me to this. I've been looking for this very function.