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 a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
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Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#52QGIS 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…
I do all my GIS work in R, and prefer it to a GUI first approach to be honest.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#53As 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.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#54If 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
Yes, that's one missing piece. Excellent software but there is a steep learning curve, and it has its own format that you need to convert back and forth from.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#55If 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.
I played with it some last year. not much has changed since I used it in a GIS class in 2007 in college.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#56Is 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?
LibreOffice vs Office 365/Google Drive is probably the more relevant comparison. I won’t comment on market share, but even if theoretically QGIS totally displaced ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap/ArcGIS on the desktop, the arena of competition has shifted to ArcGIS Online and its competitors. And once you’re in ArcGIS Online, Pro becomes the convenient choice for desktop editing. LibreOffice could be miles better than Office on des…
I don't think the comparison is quite apt, because while LibreOffice has no support for collaborative workflows (short of error-prone shared drives), QGIS can connect to quite a few geospatial databases, with third parties offering plugins for their own cloud platforms.
It would be nice to have better support for browser-based sharing and editing, but the desktop-based parts are there already.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#57One 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.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#58I 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.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#59I’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 gen…
I recommend asking ChatGPT for help. Tell it what you’re trying to do, and don’t be afraid to ask the dumbest questions.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#60If 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.
Uh, that is demonstrably not true. ArcGIS Enterprise (Portal, hosting servers, datastore, geoevent) all also run on Linux.
Now where ArcGIS enterprise succeeds is being in an actual enterprise (thousands of users), having groups collaborate, data control, and more. None of the enterprise-y bits exist.
And QGis is more akin to ArcGIS Pro, not Enterprise.
Now, yes, it is definitely resource hungry. And also, if you administer it, HA isn't really HA. Theres tons of footguns in how they implement HA that makes it a SPOF.
Also, for relevancy, I was the one who worked with one of their engineers and showed that WebAdapters (iis reverse proxy for AGE) could be installed multiply on the same machine, using SNI. 11.2 was the first to include my contribution to that.
Edit: gotta love the -1s. What do you all want? Screenshots of my account on my.esri.com? Pictures of Portal and the Linux console they're running on? The fact its 80% Apache Tomcat and Java, with the rest Python3? Or how about the 300 ish npm modules, 80 of which on the last security scan I did showed compromise?
Everything I said was completely true. This is what I'm paid to run. Can't say who, cause we can't edit posts after 1 or so hours.
I would LOVE to push FLOSS everywhere. QGIS would mostly replace ArcGIS Pro, with exception of things like Experience Builder and other weird vertical tools. But yeah. I know this industry. Even met Jack a few times.