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.
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
#72QGIS 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!
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.
Check out Atlas.co - kind of like airtable but for spatial data and spatial tools
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#73Is there a web version?
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#74As 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.
I spent the better part of a month doing just this. Really fascinating. There are also several public satellite imagery repos (mostly European sources, but they’re satellites, so they aren’t limited to Europe).
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#75If 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 adm…
Speaking of ArcGIS and reverse proxies, they were circulating a single-file .ashx script for about a decade that ended up being the single worst security breach at several large government customers of mine… ever. By a mile.
For the uninitiated: this proxy was a hack to work around the poor internal architecture of ArcGIS enterprise, and to make things “work” it took the target server URL as a query parameter.
So yes, you guessed right: any server. Any HTTP to HTTPS endpoint anywhere on the network. In fact you could hack TCP services too if you knew a bit about protocol smuggling. Anonymously. From the Internet. Fun!
I’m still finding this horror embedded ten folders deep in random ASP.NET apps running in production.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#76I’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 hate to tell you to RTFM, but the QGIS team has put a lot of effort into the User Guide and very practical Training Manual.
If you're already familiar with typical GIS workflows, you'll breeze through them, and they'll help you wrap your head around the QGIS way of doing things.
https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/user_manual/
https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/training_manual/
And if you're into books, Locate Press is run by some of the original QGIS authors, and many of their books are very QGIS centric.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 adm…
Speaking of ArcGIS and reverse proxies, they were circulating a single-file .ashx script for about a decade that ended up being the single worst security breach at several large government customers of mine… ever. By a mile. For the uninitiated: this proxy was a hack to work around the poor internal architecture of ArcGIS enterprise, and to make things “work” it took the target server URL as a query parameter . So ye…
I'm acutely aware of that.
The folks who hired me didn't realize I was also a hacker. I did my due diligence as well, and this was more 10.3 . And yes, it was terrible.
I know that FEMA and EPA both are running their public portals as 10.8 , which is really bad. There's usually between 8-12 critical (cvss 3.0 9 or greater) per version bump. Fuck if I know how federal acquisitions even allow this, but yeahhh.
Also, on Hosting Server install, theres configs with commented out internal ticket numbers. You search this on google, and you'll find out 25% of the IPs that hit it are Chinese. Obviously, for software thats used predominantly in the US government, a whole bunch of folks in opposition to us are writing it. And damn, the writing quality is TERRIBLE.
basically, if you have to run ArcGIS enterprise, keep it internal only if at all possible. Secure Portal operation is NOT to be trusted. And if you do need a public API, keep the single machine in DMZ, or better yet, isolated on a cloud. Copy the data as a bastion, like a S3 bucket or rsync, or something. Dont connect it to your enterprise.
Oh and even with 11.5 , there are a multitude of hidden options you can set with the config for WebAdapter, including full debug. Some even save local creds like for portaladmin.
Oh yeah, and if you access the Portal postgres DB, and query the users table, you'll find 20 or so Esri accounts that are intentionally hidden from the Users list in portal on :7443 . The accounts do appear disabled... But, why are they even there to begin with?
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
My brother is a GIS expert and does this for a living. At his workplace (trans-european electrical project) they use ArcGIS and privately he uses QGIS. He said he'd pick QGIS over ArcGIS every single day. ArcGIS is very polished, but everything costs extra. QGIS has less polish but is supremely hackable and there are plugins for nearly everything. Having used QGIS as a non-expert to extract mountain heightmaps from a…
I come from the ArcView 3 / ArcInfo days. I still maintain a non professional home license which is nice, however they killed off ArcMap for non-enterprise and I just cant for the life of me get into Arc Pro or QGis. Old dog, no new tricks for me I guess.
Geopandas and QGIS are my go to. QGIS for basic work, automate with Geopandas.
It makes the work a lot of fun!
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#79As 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.
Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of ArcGIS and reverse proxies, they were circulating a single-file .ashx script for about a decade that ended up being the single worst security breach at several large government customers of mine… ever. By a mile. For the uninitiated: this proxy was a hack to work around the poor internal architecture of ArcGIS enterprise, and to make things “work” it took the target server URL as a query parameter . So ye…
I'm acutely aware of that. The folks who hired me didn't realize I was also a hacker. I did my due diligence as well, and this was more 10.3 . And yes, it was terrible. I know that FEMA and EPA both are running their public portals as 10.8 , which is really bad. There's usually between 8-12 critical (cvss 3.0 9 or greater) per version bump. Fuck if I know how federal acquisitions even allow this, but yeahhh. Also, on…
This is horrible!