QGIS 4.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: QGIS 4.0

#31

Post by etskinner » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

mastermage wrote: post #25

Qgis my beloved used it during my Masters extensively and its great. Only ever problem i had was that it did not support circular maps. Or rather non rectangular map borders. So i had to use some arcane magic in Julia to make those.

Why did you need circular maps?

Re: QGIS 4.0

#32

Post by pahbloo » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

boredemployee wrote: post #13

Funny that this is on the front page of HN. I’m currently attending a 3 day in person immersive course at a university. For what applications are you guys using it for? Curious about the potential

I work with and contribute to a QGIS plugin that manage water and sewage network data. Together with PostGIS, it's a powerful tool.

https://github.com/giswater

Re: QGIS 4.0

#33

Post by tonyarkles » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

ogig wrote: post #27

QGIS has been a key piece of my career for the past 10 years. This year I'm launching a SaaS where QGIS is, again, the most fundamental piece. I'm only hoping everything goes right so I can contribute back to this project what It deserves. One of the big OSS stars. Thanks QGIS team.

It has ended up being a huge piece of the last 7 years of my life and I didn't really intend for that to be the case. I have a strong bias towards "use industry-standard protocols when possible", so when we started adding some significant geospatial components to the UAV system I work on, I pushed hard for us to use GeoJSON or Spatialite wherever possible (we have since also added some Parquet). From that foundation, I started doing analysis with GeoPandas, which works great when you know what you're looking for but not amazing just for data exploration. Enter QGIS: because we settled on standard open formats... I can just go "Add vector layer..." and load the entirety of a flight's geospatial data right on top of a Google Map without doing any kind of data conversion at all!

Does it have quirks? Yes. Many. QGIS is an incredibly powerful tool, and it has caused me to swear at so many different pieces of it :D. Looking forward to checking out QGIS 4 and see what they've been cooking.

Re: QGIS 4.0

#34

Post by apexalpha » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

Wow. I recently joined a grid management company and we use an (in my view) ancient piece of German software called Lovion. It's written in .net 4 I think.

Crazy to now see this piece of (free!) software that essentially runs circles around the software we pay heavily for.

Re: QGIS 4.0

#35

Post by dhx » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

realA12l wrote: post #2

I get an 504 error when trying to open the page. There's no changelog page for 4.0 linked on the home page, so I guess that it hasn't been created yet?

https://web.archive.org/web/20260303144625/https://changelog...

Re: QGIS 4.0

#36

Post by jschrf » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

boredemployee wrote: post #13

Funny that this is on the front page of HN. I’m currently attending a 3 day in person immersive course at a university. For what applications are you guys using it for? Curious about the potential

I've used it for gixapixel scale rendering projects. Giant wall murals at 300 DPI.

QGIS is incredibly powerful.

Re: QGIS 4.0

#37

Post by ascorbic » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

QGIS is one of the small number of truly great open source desktop apps.

Re: QGIS 4.0

#38

Post by zzleeper » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

I used QGIS 2.x and 3.x a lot when making maps for research papers. But something that always stung was reproducibility. The python tooling was not there compared to what I could do with click-and-mouse, and there was no easy way to transfer my click-and-mouse sessions into an equivalent python script.

Is the situation unchanged? (Maybe a good use for Opus would be to write a wrapper for the python tooling?)

Re: QGIS 4.0

#39

Post by ACCount37 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

Hackbraten wrote: post #10

ra wrote: post #8

there's really no excuse for not running cloudflare at least it is 2026.

Don’t you dare take away the little rest of the internet for me that does NOT constantly lock me out using the snake oil that is Cloudflare’s Turnstile.

How dare you go online without a clean IP at a first world country home ISP! You should be subjected to 99 captchas a minute for it!

Re: QGIS 4.0

#40

Post by NelsonMinar » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

QGIS is the rare open source product that made great improvements in usability. It's still got lots of warts and lack of polish but a lot of the core features are quite accessible in a way they weren't 5 years ago.