by rthnbgrredf
9 subcomments
- If you are in an enterprise setting and you currently evaluate ArcGIS vs QGIS, pick QGIS and thank me later. ArcGIS Enterprise is a piece of software that feels straight out of the 90s and has no native linux binary (can be started with wine). It is expensive as hell and resource hungry.
- As a hacker, a really fun thing to do with QGIS is locate your local government’s GIS data portal. At least in the US, most data is freely available and can be pulled into QGIS as layers. Fun things like lidar surveys, flood zones, property boundaries. If you’re at all interested in geography and want to explore your locality it can be great fun.
- QGIS is fantastic - it's the only OSS viewer I know of that can consistently and efficiently display multi-GB TIFF images without crashing. It has been a long journey - 20 years to capture ~8% of the geospatial market. ESRI still rules the enterprise, with 40-50% of the market share. More generally, there are so many excellent open source geospatial projects like Geoserver, GDAL, Geonode, Map GL Libre, kepler.gl, Martin, Mapserver, .... but they still have not managed to disrupt ESRI. I think because they are still too fragmented, and still mostly stuck on the desktop, while everything is moving to the cloud.
- When you mention QGIS, you should also mention GDAL, JTS, udig, geoserver, open stree maps, open scene graph, FWtools etc. Open source GIS has awesome list of projects and people, QGIS being only one of them. It really fascinates me.
by ricardonunez
0 subcomment
- I use QGIS together with https://mapshaper.org/ converting shapefiles into geojson to use together with D3js on https://createaclickablemap.com/. It is a very useful tool, I am grateful for it. It is just awesome.
- QGIS is a very useful tool that I often rely on for quick exploration of datasets in my work. But dear god the UI is in desperate need of a huge overhaul by someone who knows what they are doing.
Massed rows of toolbars with tiny icons, lots of unintuitive behaviour, and a few weird quirks.
It's a very powerful tool, but so much of its utility is completely inaccessible without tutorials and videos to explain it.
- I use QGIS to make NDVI maps for my farm from the Sentinel satellite data. Combined with yield maps from harvest, I can come up with soil sampling sites and create a variable rate fertilizing plan. I then plug that into AgOpenGPS for the fertilizer spreader.
Stallman approved.
- QGIS is great. It's a slightly janky version of ArcMap, but ArcMap has always been janky anyway, so it doesn't matter for most things. And QGIS is super extensible.
There have been so many random times that QGIS has helped me out over the years. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to it!
- My wife uses this a lot. ArcMap used to be de-facto software in her field, but QGis has overtaken that completely. It might not be as polished as ArcMap, it's missing a few guardrails that would prevent you messing up, but it has more features, extensions, better platform support and is free as in beer.
For folks working on QGis: thank you
- QGIS is a gold standard to verify you tools works fine and data is in a correct format ...
if you are a web based first, you have even better options to build and extend
kepler, protomaps, maplibre-gl-js
https://kepler.gl
https://protomaps.com
https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js
the rest can be found on great Qiusheng Wu’s (aka @giswqs) Geo/GeoAI tutorials channels and repos
https://www.youtube.com/@giswqs/videos
https://x.com/giswqs
but what really amazed me is how geo spatial support is growing inside of databases recently
https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/core_extensions/spatial/overv...
all mighty postgis https://postgis.net/docs/manual-3.5/postgis_cheatsheet-en.ht...
https://sedona.apache.org/latest/
https://geoparquet.org/releases/v1.0.0/
and many unlocked dataset compare to other industries
https://docs.overturemaps.org/getting-data/duckdb/
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
https://hub.arcgis.com/search
lot great webtools are comming for sure and you still can be 100% of most of your geospatial pipeline
p.s. want to extend the above list with self-hosted tools with minimum or none dependencies on paid APIs, and recommendations are greatly appreciated
by 0cf8612b2e1e
6 subcomments
- Is this on its way to pushing out the incumbent proprietary solution and becoming the standard a la Blender? Or is this more LibreOffice -it’s there, but missing so much functionality/polish that an expert will immediately find blockers vs the status quo?
- When I have to do anything with geo data i think this is a one of the first tools i reach for. Integrates with lots of formats, storages. Have lots of plugins and scripting functionality. And it's free like in speech.
- I recently participated in a hackathon, and our project was centered around PostGIS. We wanted to work with our queries in a more interactive way without having to fiddle with frontend stuff, so I did a very cursory search and found QGIS. It allowed us to iterate faster and instantly became an invaluable tool. The ability to run SQL queries and see and compare queries results visually saved us days of work.
by otter-in-a-suit
0 subcomment
- I adore QGIS. I just built a map (and corresponding GeoPDF file for offline use) for two local wildlife management areas last weekend (and subsequently used them while on them).
by NoboruWataya
0 subcomment
- It sounds weird but QGIS is one of those projects that I don't use but I love that it exists and wish I had reason to use it more. A bit like Blender.
- Qgis is great on the desktop. On the browser side I find openlayers to be a well thought out gis framework.
A lot of things are evolving though in the gis world. You can now, even in the browser, render huge datasets with geoparquet, geoarrow, wasm and webgl.
- As a FreeCAD project admin, it's always been interesting to keep an eye on QGIS development, not just with regards to the GIS domain, but more generally how niche applications like this can swim against the current of proprietary incumbent behemoths.
- there's also some open source ways to share spatial data as a website from QGIS like LizMap [1], MapStore [2], and Mundi [3]
[1] https://www.lizmap.com/en/
[2] https://docs.mapstore.geosolutionsgroup.com/en/latest/
[3] https://mundi.ai/
- One of the coolest things to do in QGIS is to add a layer from Postgres (PostGIS) directly and just plot an entire table as a layer, live.
It’s made for some really streamlined analysis.
by kevinkoning
0 subcomment
- I can't help but pile on here. I have had a corporate license of ArcGIS but have used QGIS instead because it simply worked better to process the data I had. ESRI and ArcGIS have a long history of reporting errors with absolutely no helpful information. I swear half the errors are something like "Error 999999: Error executing function." Good luck debugging!!
by michaelhoney
3 subcomments
- I work with QGIS, but until recently I’ve only skated over the surface. In the last year or so I’ve found LLMs increasingly useful as a companion to help me code automation scripts or just to ask “how can I do this?” questions. QGIS is deep and powerful but that power can be hard to access. LLMs make it a lot easier.
- Fabulous software. I used it to create LIDAR map tiles from free UK government LIDAR data of my local area (Hampshire, UK) at https://solentmaps.uk. When used as a layer placed under standard map tiles, you can see all sorts of long-hidden historical artefacts under modern deep foliage. The ruins of a long-forgotten WW1 hospital near me can be clearly seen under the modern day trees. Fun stuff to play with.
- Ah QGIS. Love working with it (it got me through university + 3 years of being in the planning industry w/o touching Esri)! hated managing it on the Mac admin side (no ARM native build and more importantly no notarized builds). I do hear v4 might fix both issues so I’m looking forward to that next month.
- QGIS is the shit. I absolutely love it, great for visualizing GeoJSON, GeoTIFF files, open data feeds, etc. My one gripe is that their macOS installers have been out of date for ages now, the best way I've found is to actually install from Conda Forge directly:
> brew install micromamba
> mamba install qgis
It's really crazy the number of open geospatial data feeds that exist out there from NASA, NOAA, and ESA. If you're interested in checking any of this stuff out, I highly encourage following Mark Litwinchik's blog, this guy is a legend and he does most of his work with open tools like QGIS and DuckDB
https://tech.marksblogg.com/
- I have nothing but good things to say about QGIS.
by sreekanth850
0 subcomment
- Long back i used Manifold. It was not opensource but much cheaper and faster than ArcMap
by throwawayqgis
2 subcomments
- I’ve worked in the GIS space for a while, developed mapping services on the backend and frontend, the whole thing.
And yet I’ve never been able to get into QGIS. I’ve used the ogr libraries, I know that there’s an incredible amount of smart work behind these tools. 100% all due respect to everyone involved.
But I’ve found the ui so daunting that I’ve never been able to use it.
I want to be proven wrong. Are there gentle/great tutorials/guides?
I know this isn’t a “vpn software before tailscale” kind of situation. But, you know?
- I’ve recently had a certificate related error on mine.
- I had geo data to find a new city to move out, with lat lon, population, price, etc
I just used leaflet, it was fine
spatialite is also good enough as a spatial database
unless you are doing complex stuff with GIS data, I don't see the point of using such a large software
by stevenhubertron
1 subcomments
- Qgis is powerful and free but it’s slow, has the steepest learning curve and gets in your way. I am happy it exists but it’s not great.
by funnyenough
1 subcomments
- Is there a web version?
- I have used it in the past, it is excellent.
by techlatest_net
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by junglistguy
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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