>real-time collab is not exclusive to webapps.

Sure, but once you make the effort required to build a real time app, there are vanishingly few reasons why not to have it as a web app. Some of them provide a desktop app as well but they all provide a web app.

As a designer, you can just send a link to your design to anyone, end users, clients, developers, managers. And they just click it and it shows up and works. No need for installing software, setting up accounts, etc. A lot of these web apps are actually C++ and then compiled to web assembly so they are quite fast.

Do you use source control or do you email zips with the source files between you and the other developers? The collaboration here is exactly the same as that distinction in workflows.

It's obviously not just "two clicks", it's "Text copy 2 final final alt reviewed.doc" and then you get a new person email their suggested updates to you as "Text copy 2 final 2.doc" and you have to somehow merge those suggestions in with the head version.

With Word at least there's the ability to do suggestions rather than direct edits to let you collaborate against nonsynced docs at all, but with Inkscape when that happens you'll literally just get a different svg and you can't actually merge at all, instead you'd need to conceptually understand what edits were made and then make them again manually to the "head" version, which is completely redundant work.

> you'd need to conceptually understand what edits were made

    Same effort as reviewing the file history

> and then make them again manually to the "head" version

    Copy + Paste

This post is about Inkscape and Inkscape svgs dont have any edit history baked into them. If you had a dozen revisions and one of several collaborators sends you a suggestion version which they edited from some unknown revision what would you do with that? The file itself doesn't imply what deltas they made, and "copy paste" doesn't make sense, since what would you even be copy+pasting?

Do you honestly think there's no way?

Yes, I honestly think that if you have collaborators doing edits forming a DAG of derived artifacts, and you only observe a subset of those artifacts that you can't take some arbitrary artifact and merge that correctly with another arbitrary that opaquely branched some point in the past. And that is what consistently happens with the "just email some zips of the documents" collaboration flows.

Git helps by forcing the deltas to be knowable, but at the expense of a complex management tool and only really working on text based source. All other modern software now solves this problem by being online collaborative which eliminates the problem entirely, and that benefit dwarfs any other feature for most corporate/organizational usecases.

Inkscape is great software, but it's not acceptable software if you're going to collaborate with multiple other people who will all be making edits to the same document.

If you wonder how people collaborated (and still collaborate) without this tech let me know.

Actually desktip Word has realtime collaboration these days, although getting it to work can be challenging