121–130 of 131 posts
Stallman approved.
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.
Used QGis for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Could only used it with the help of ChatGPT. But, I got what I wanted in a reasonable amount of time.
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.
Yes, it has a better UI than ArcGIS, and uses less memory, but only slightly so. It still looks like it escaped from 1995's Neckbeard Labs, is clunky as heck, and eats tons of memory as well.
It's still a great piece of software, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade it for any other GIS tool. But there's a long way to go for GIS software.
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It's sadly the norm for monopolistic industry-specific software. You see the same lack of due diligence in SCADA software and the like.
How is it monopolistic?
It’s roughly the same story as with MS Office vs its alternatives. They exist, but 99% of enterprises will use only the Microsoft suite.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Govs used QGIS as alternative to pricey ESRI subscriptions, but come to realize that it is struggling even as a viewer. Happily latest versions allow simplification of features on the server side, but these are very new QGISs
also take a look here
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Ao...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it monopolistic?
ArcGIS has essentially no competition in their industry and market. The open source alternatives are not as fully featured, etc… It’s roughly the same story as with MS Office vs its alternatives. They exist, but 99% of enterprises will use only the Microsoft suite.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Been using QGIS for about 6 years now for doing manual data analysis, as well as GDAL and Spatialite in C++ for creating/saving datasets and geopandas, Shapely, pyproj, etc for automated analysis. QGIS is an odd duck. Part of the complexity of using it is the fundamental complexity of GIS software. There’s way more background info that I didn’t know (what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything wit…
> what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything without a bunch more info?! Is the more info just the coordinate system like WGS84, or am I missing something else?
The worst part is that if you don’t get it exactly right, you’ll still get answers that look right but are shifted by maybe 1-3m. As an example, we had a field team out with a Trimble survey stick with RTK (nominal accuracy 1-2cm) that they were using to cross-check data from our aerial survey platform. We had laid out a bunch of targets on the ground, which they surveyed the corners for. Most of the time there was a fantastic match between the aerial survey data and the ground truth data, but occasionally there was a pretty large offset. As I discovered WAY too late, exactly one of the cellphones that ran the Trimble app had its coordinate system set to one of the Canadian CSRS frames instead of WGS84: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/science-data/science-res...
Edit: naturally, they just handed me the coordinates in a CSV file that they’d captured. The Trimble app + whatever data collection app didn’t actually record the reference frame.
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.
Been using QGIS for about 6 years now for doing manual data analysis, as well as GDAL and Spatialite in C++ for creating/saving datasets and geopandas, Shapely, pyproj, etc for automated analysis. QGIS is an odd duck. Part of the complexity of using it is the fundamental complexity of GIS software. There’s way more background info that I didn’t know (what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything wit…
That's sort of true, but QGIS could do a much better job of helping you manage this stuff, figuring out the right CRS, helping you make sense of clashing CRS'es etc.
> highlighted points, whether selected through the selection UI or through the data table… should always have a higher Z-order than the other points around them
I haven't come across that one much, but generally I wish the UI around querying data was much better. First it takes me ages to find the one specific tiny little button which lets you query stuff, then you have to remember to pick which layer you want to query, etc etc.
It's the most obvious mode, and should be the default, and not buried amongst a dozen other icons I'll never use.