If what you're trying to make is a "sweep" or "conical" gradient, use the "tiled clones feature" - its a little complicated the first time, but it works and in practice isn't as much of a pain in the behind as it might seem up front. I'm tired, but i'll try and link to ...

there are many ways to do what i think you're asking about. But I would set up a good grid, and in outline mode use arcs (the circle tool and setting the start and finish angles) and the pen tool for straight lines. Do this with grid snapping on so that you can make sure that end points are aligned ...

Text in Inkscape is a little wonky in so far as bringing in text from other vector apps is concerned. I think the problem currently has more to do with the text handling parts of the SVG spec its self than with a shortcoming of Inkscape. There's a few annual gatherings of stakeholders (including Ink...

This should be marked [solved] (imo)

the problem is that the engines that display svg icons, like Qt only implement the smallest sub-set of the whole standard. In the case of Gnome and KDE (which relies on Qt SVG classes) it's the SVG-Tiny spec. So because of this Gtk+ apps show them differently than Qt apps. (remember the bad old days...