Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 131 posts

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#41

Post by hyperman1 »

snypher wrote: post #21
Qem wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably closer to the first situation. It curb stomped ArcGIS in the geographic information system community. When I started working with GIS at work, expensive ESRI products were default in this market, a la matlab in another field. Most coleages of mine had not heard about QGIS. Now QGIS is ubiquitous. It did to ArcGIS and its countless paid add on modules what scipy/numpy did to matlab.

>It curb stomped ArcGIS in the geographic information system community Maybe for home or casual use, sure. I use a ~$4500/y Esri license level and it's worth every penny. Also, plenty of people are still using matlab!

Interesting. I see a lot of people around me using QGIS and all kinds of both free and paid gis tools. I never worked with ArcGIS, except for importing their files, but it seems to be universally loathed around here, even if licensing and money is not the problem. So what are the places where ArcGIS does better?

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#42

Post by thirtygeo »

larodi wrote: post #29
mirchiseth wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you work in GIS field and it is useful? I am trying to see how a GIS tool will help a typical audience here that may be a little interested in maps + data.

its good for teaching, otherwise it may be super clumsy with large layers and this is unsolvable in the near future. ref. ticket. even so, we must admit, is still the most comprehensive opensource something to compete with esri.

So weird to see this comment. QGIS powering government GIS groups and used by major geoscience and mining companies.. working with national sized vector and raster data.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#43

Post by boxerab »

awesan wrote: post #24
boxerab wrote: post #19

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, Mar…

We are running mapserver in production in the cloud (AWS lambda) to visualize lots of different data using WMS. We're also doing lots of processing using GDAL in the cloud as well. Compared to ESRI it's amazingly cost effective even considering Amazon's high prices.

nice. If you aren't already familiar, you might be interested in this platform for Dutch geospatial data: https://github.com/PDOK . They use mapserver on the cloud at massive scale, and all of their infra is open.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#44

Post by admaiora »

ageitgey wrote: post #7

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!

QGIS is janky? It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today. Most built-in tools run way faster than AG Pro, and once the move to QT6 with 4.0 is complete this october, we'll finally get native builds on M-series Mac as well.

I couldn't even know where to start listing the upsides compared to ESRI offering, fron PostGIS integration all the way to the simplicity of plugins.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#45

Post by aanet »

aduffy wrote: post #3

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 yo…

Thanks...

Do you absolutely need `mamba` / `conda`??

Can you use `uv` instead to install QGIS? Any experiences to share?

Thanks!!

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#46

Post by showcaseearth »

rthnbgrredf wrote: post #31

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.

+100. There is very little QGIS cannot do as well or better than ArcGIS. For any shortcomings, there are generally other specialized tools that can fill the gaps. It's really just a training issue more than technical one at this point imo.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#47

Post by showcaseearth »

admaiora wrote: post #44
ageitgey wrote: post #7

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!

QGIS is janky? It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today. Most built-in tools run way faster than AG Pro, and once the move to QT6 with 4.0 is complete this october, we'll finally get native builds on M-series Mac as well. I couldn't even know where to start listing the upsides compared to ESRI offering, fron PostGIS integration all the way to the simplicity of plugins.

>It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today

lol, the bar is not high. It can be both the smoothest and extremely janky at times. Let's be honest with ourselves here. (and I do agree, it's among the best running... but also janky).

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#48

Post by okok3857 »

larodi wrote: post #28
dbacar wrote: post #18

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.

and of course the king - PostGIS and also that qgis installs 1g+ of all these goodies tied together.

Fun fact: QGIS was originally written just to view PostGIS tables.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#49

Post by mapmeld »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #11

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?

I work at a university and we do a lot of moving data around, inspecting the files and columns, scripting, etc. so we have everyone use QGIS. Governments and other major consumers have open-ended long-term contracts for whatever Esri products they can think of, so those are solid.

For me the real ongoing question is the role of MapBox, MapLibre, to some extent Google Maps API, and other web-first solutions. It's difficult for Esri to connect with the average web developer or researcher who just wants to start with clickable pins on a map.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#50

Post by detourdog »

rthnbgrredf wrote: post #31

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.

What about GRASS?

https://grass.osgeo.org

Post reply on HN