QGIS and PostGIS were my jam when I worked in that space. We were an ESRI shop so Oracle/SQL Server with SDE (topped with ArcGIS) were the official tools. Some of us were always looking for ways to subvert the culture by building tools based on open source stacks.
One of my favorite experiences from that era: We were meeting with a few ESRI reps for some integration stuff. The lead hot-shot was on his phone playing around during the meeting. He was basically on autopilot. The other two folks were working with GeoJSON response convertors. I said, "I built one of those with TopoJSON". One guy said, "I've never heard of it". I showed them how it was much more efficient and used splines instead of points. The lead dropped his phone and said, "I need you to tell me MORE about that". I showed them the service. They invited me to lunch, I politely declined and said, "today's my last day so I have a ton of things to wrap up". I do miss that realm sometimes.
The moment I graduated and lost access to ArcGIS I got out QGIS and become ridiculously empowered. Yea Arc has Python APIs for some things but QGIS, while rough in the UI department, gives you powerful access to everything. And it plays so well with other things: check out my presentation on using QGIS in robotics (pdf) https://roscon.ros.org/2018/presentations/ROSCon2018_Unleash...
QGIS is very powerful, but it's not exactly user friendly. The UI is hard to learn, and important functionality is buried several layers deep in non-intuitive drop-down menus and buttons.
I think a simplified GIS program with stripped-down functionality and an intuitive UI could be a big hit. Think of SketchUp versus SolidWorks or ProE.
In many ways that is what we're building at Felt (where I work). We don't offer much in the way of analysis, but we make it very easy (IMO of course) to share your maps.
I think part of the question (and problem) is, which part of QGIS do you focus on? The digitizing and geometry parts? The map-rendering part? Georeferencing? Vector and raster analysis?
Or to put it another way, what's the workflow that a simpler, more opinionated interface would solve, and what features could or would you sacrifice for it?
Some years ago QGIS was useful to me in spite of its UI: I got a PDF map of certain infrastructure that was not georeferenced, and I was able to correct its projection to Web Mercator with great acccuracy. But at the end I was somehow unable to find out how to export the data! QGIS did show me with the transformation matrix it had built and I wrote a program that applied that matrix to my files.
No argument there.
I've worked with ArcGIS, Autocad, Sketchup, Civil3D, and QGIS. Though clumsy, QGIS is the most powerful by far of these applications.
I've been using QGIS a bit for simple things. Viewing OSM road data in a PostGIS database. Viewing geojson files. Everything has been more difficult than I expected, but I think that might just come with the territory. I'm working through PostGIS in Action to try to get the requisite background knowledge.
One thing that's frustrated me, and I want to make sure it isn't a misconfiguration on my end, is that QGIS feels really slow. For example, I have a 150MB geojson file which has 300,000 points with associated metadata. Even when I'm zoomed in such that I can only see a few thousand points at a time, if I pan the map over by 50% it takes at least 10 seconds before it loads in the new points. Many long operations seem to take place synchronously on the UI thread, so the whole app is unresponsive while they take place. Clicking the drop down arrow on a PostGIS Schema to view the tables spins for several minutes. No other Postgres tool I have takes that long, so it's not the database. The PostGIS import/export tools were also extremely slow and didn't have progress bars. I'm using 3.24 currently. I don't want to rag on it too hard, but it's really hampered my enthusiasm for working with maps and GIS.
I’m slowly making a map of my back yard in QGIS. One annoyance: I live in a place where tectonic movement over my expected lifespan is significant on the scale of my map. And so are the supposed inaccuracies in various coordinate systems. (I want to record where things are so I can find them again without digging big holes!)
As far as I can tell, QGIS has no particular understanding of either a coordinate relative to the (moving!) crust or of a coordinate in space-time that can be projected to space at future or past times. Surely this should be a thing!
I found HTDP, a web tool that can shift coordinates forward and back in time:
(I have an RTK-capable GPS and NTRIP data via UNAVCO from a nearby CORS station. I was hoping that storing position relative to such-and-such CORS station as it was on such—and-such date would be straightforwardly doable in QGIS.)
Wow that’s a pretty interesting (and scary) challenge.
I know that the coordinate systems get revised every few years. In Australia we used to use AGD83 then it was revised to GDA94 and more recently to GDA2020 — and this was to account for tectonic shifts. And there’s calculations for transforming from one to the other.
That’s the only clues I have on that side of things and I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve known.
I am doing the same, Mainly I wanted to record where pipes and such are located but might as well record buildings, fences and trees while there. I was not worried about geologic movement but all the global coordinate systems felt very clunky when locally mapping at the centimeter level, I finally settled on having a well defined surveyed reference point, and using meters north and east off that.
Perhaps that would work for you. because while the plate is shifting with respect to the globe, everything on that plate will maintain the same relative position.
I used to program python plugins for QGIS, I really miss it. It made me feel really useful, I'd write visualization algorithms one day and the next it was deployed to the whole company and people would email me telling me how much easier it made their job. I don't think I've ever felt this valued since, every other job I had was a small part of a big whole.
Hello, would love to chat with you about QGIS plugins. Email me at [email protected] if you would be interested in making a QGIS plugin for the solar PV industry :)
QGIS is absolutely one of the biggest open source success stories. Its interesting to see the funding and delivery of new features is largely done in Europe where in the US it is extrmely hard to not use ESRI products.
A couple of packages used by qgis worth calling out - postgis which really grew up with qgis, and pdal which is a relatively new but incredible package for working with point cloud data.
Yes, Europe is going the OSS path. I work at University and almost everyone I know in GIS fields switched to QGIS in the past 5 years. Most government departments are also (trying) to switch, some succeeded already (others are waiting for important people to enter pension, so their replacements are more OSS minded).
Disclosure: I work for Esri, creator of ArcGIS, so obviously I'm extremely biased. But I'm not in sales, just a lowly dev fwiw.
QGIS is great software, and I respect what they're doing.
ArcGIS Online is a pretty great option and the Living Atlas [1] makes it really easy to consume a lot of data (a bunch of NASA datasets were recently added) and make cool maps. ArcGIS Online ends up being almost like Dropbox for geographic data, but instead of just files you can get full services, and a suite of apps for taking advantage of the services. That includes taking maps offline, making field edits, and syncing them (although that starts to cost money).
You can try the map tool without signing in, and that gives you a good idea of what you can do in the browser (custom popups, charts, tables, filtering, symbology, clustering, cartographic blending, etc). https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=dece...
The personal use subscription is $100/year and includes the full desktop software and cloud storage. [2]
ArcGIS is painfully slow. To apply symbology, you need to go to toolbox, select apply symbology, select the layers, select the symbology file, then make sure to select maintain ranges which for an absolute no sense reason is not the default, then click on apply.
ArcGIS then proceeds to apply symbology one layer at a time, taking between 30 to 75 seconds per layer to apply it.
In QGIS, right click in layer, copy symbology, select other layers right click, paste symbology. Done in 3 seconds.
And like that I could be hours and hours talking about similar experiences.
ArcGIS might be much more powerful, but honestly it isn't worth spending 45 minutes to what in QGIS can be done in 5 minutes.
QGIS is fantastic and that team deserves a lot of praise for their work over the years. However, the article calls out using KML as a data source and unfortunately QGIS does not have the best support for KML. One of the reasons KML is still around despite it's faults is because a KML author can easily design a UI for their data in Google Earth, organizing data by folders with descriptions, including pre-defined views and image overlays among other things (a basic example here: https://kmzview.com/5qBGblENff4w0RkQf89J). Then, anybody who opens that KML in Google Earth gets that same UI. There are a lot of casual consumers of this type of data and this experience is powerful for them. I think QGIS could really broaden their appeal to this casual user base by supporting these well-loved KML features.
A couple of years ago I started working with drones and writing a bunch of custom software. One of my pet peeves in the drone industry is that a ton of stuff uses “reinvented wheels” that are drone-specific or product-specific instead of just riffing on open standards. Given that, I decided to spend a day or two and do a bit of a survey of the different open standards that are available around kind of the GIS/mapping world, the aviation world, etc.
At this point I didn’t even know about QGIS, but I was happy that instead of reinventing the wheel I already had well-defined file formats etc. to work with. QGIS came a little bit later when I had a bunch of data to analyze. My image metadata wasn’t exactly right for QGIS (and couldn’t have been done that way in real-time anyway), but a 3-line shell script using GDAL converted all of my images into something QGIS could load and draw directly overlaid on top of Google Maps. My flight plans were all done in annotated GeoJSON, which QGIS happily loaded as-is and helpfully split it into the layers I had used under the hood as my data encoding. There were a couple of files that were just plain-old CSV, and QGIS happily ingested those and drew them as points and lines and line segments as appropriate.
It’s phenomenally good. Some other people in this discussion have mentioned that the UI is a bit rough and I can’t disagree with that, although I feel the same way about the commercial tools too. It’s a power tool for sure, but it doesn’t take too long to figure out the quirks and build yourself a workflow.
I spent a decade in the GIS space, ending back around the final days of ArcGIS 9.x, or very early days of 10.x. I also remember various alternative and early open source efforts of the time.
Then, about a year ago, after several years away from the scene, I got some mojo back and started investigating modern QGIS. I was very pleasantly surprised, it immediately felt like an upgrade from what I used to use. And also felt like coming home, in that it was obvious and intuitive how to accomplish the standard functions. If someone had put me in (that famous thing) a blindfolded time machine for a zero-year trip, popped me out, put me in front of QGIS and said "Welcome! This is ArcGIS 9.6!", it wouldn't have been at all unbelievable. If you know what I mean.
No it's not perfect. Casually and hastily wing your way around a project, copypasting here and there, setting up all kinds of parameters and advanced display bits&bobs, and - like most complex geospatial software - you'll, once in awhile, find yourself unceremoniously dumped out onto the desktop with a software error. So a highly robust and restore-able workflow is still essential. But regardless it's up there with the very best packages I've ever used.
Interesting, I have had the opposite experience to that. I spend a lot of time in ArcGIS late 9.x. and early 10.x and QGIS is not even remotely intuitive to me. You can drop me in ArcGIS Desktop or Pro years later and I can still intuit how to do everything, but I have to Google how to do anything in QGIS.
If you can, get yourself in front of an up to date version of ArcGIS Pro for a little while. The user interface will feel entirely different, and some people don't like it because it's different, but the entire package feels significantly better.
Importantly, a good deal, though not all, of the infuriatingly frustrating "random esri error for who knows what reason" issues have been resolved, and continue to improve.
Don't forget, QGIS is one of several projects of OSGeo. A significant part of the fundamentals come from GDAL, another OSGeo project, which is very excellent if you ever need to do some command-line processing of or need a library for raster or vector GIS data.
Their licensing isn't perfect - the QGIS installer, for example, more-or-less requires acceptance of a few free-as-in-beer but still proprietary licenses, which are used for some specific raster formats. Still, it's one of the great free software success stories, I think.
It definitely feels like they will eventually displace ESRI. Most shops will probably keep ESRI around for some format conversions or niche tasks. However, the day-to-day desktop GIS is almost exclusively QGIS in the places I've worked, if only because you can throw it on any machine you want to without worrying about licensing.
I did call out GDAL, but missed the whole OSGeo ecosystem, I’m afraid.
Very cool to hear that QGIS is such a prominent piece of software in professional settings! I’m just a software/data engineer who dabbles in this stuff for fun, so I had no idea. Lots of comments here asserting the same thing.
It would be amazing to see OSS (even though not truly FOSS) replace industry giants. I see this happening a lot in my space, where a lot of OSS (mostly Apache, some MIT and consorts) overtakes commercial offerings.
I mean I don’t want yo dis ping your experience but no shot. I’m not sure where you worked but esri just is a massively dominant player still. I’m government and infrastructure, which is esri’s primary market, QGIS is nowhere near replacing it on the desktop. Now, QGIS is a great project but we can’t be naive about the situation.
QGIS is the swiss army knife of geospatial computing.
I use it daily, and frequently, for all sorts of work building a location API SaaS company. It's a sterling success of open source, on par with as impactful as Linux, for the geospatial world (IMO).
I tried to perform what I thought were basic tasks of drawing a few line segments and measuring geodesic distances between two points, but I needed a janky plugin for the former and never figured out how to do the latter.
I really do want to learn it however, since it's a lot easier sometimes to work interactively than doing everything in Python code, and I know QGIS is supposed to be a very powerful tool in general.
What search terms would one use for finding roles in companies like this, as an experienced dev with a strong background in GIS and open source tools? E.g. Postgis/Pydata/mapbox-gl et. al.
QGIS is great, I use it daily and I hugely prefer it (and it's mobile equivalent Qfield) to ArcGIS and FieldMaps.
The educational world is pretty split between ArcGIS and QGIS. Students don't want to pay over $100 for a yearly ArGIS student license, but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS. Progress is slower in industry, especially in larger companies. Other critical software like Autodesk, Vulcan, DESWICK, MODFLOW, and Leapfrog already work (somewhat) smoothly with ArcGIS.
QGIS is just another thing to go wrong in managers minds, and there is zero opensource progress in developing applications as powerful as QGIS in geomatics adjacent fields.
Can you provide a few examples please for your statement: "but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS"? I'd like to hear more about this.
I was excited when I learned about a way to create custom georeferenced map PDFs (say, based on an official, but not georeferenced, national park map document). It used qgis, plus one or two other open source tools. It seemed straightforward, if a bit tedious. But I was never able to get the resulting files to work properly on my Android device. The instructions said to use an app called avenza maps, which would understand the georeference data, and show your maps, other maps, plus routes and tracks, all on one display. It just didn't work consistently for me, sadly.
From what I understood, qgis was doing its job properly. It was a neat tool. I guess the whole stack for this use case was just too fragile.
This piece of software brings back fond memories. It was just amazing to discover this after struggling for days with commercial ill fit tools and suddenly feeling i could do anything imaginable. We used this to model and visualize malaria cases and population distribution and plan health care monitoring in liberia. I think the only thing comparable to this feeling is discovering VLC to play video files as a teenager.
I'm trying to find a good project to work on to start learning QGIS, and what you described sounds interesting. Would you happen to have a write-up of this?
Every field has its own “occupational hazards” - I found that with maps and mapping the maps themselves were so fascinating, you could get drawn in and lose a lot of time just… exploring I guess.
QGis is great, lots of tools are nice. Generally ESRI sucks up all the oxygen and leaves not enough for innovation and implementations from anyone else. There are a lot of features and capabilities needed in the Geospatial world that do not have reliable, rock-solid open source implementations. (I could’ve provided examples a few years ago but now I’ve forgotten the important details and only have opinions left)
I love exploring open GIS datasets with QGIS. It's incredible what this tool can do and I keep discovering new features or plugins all the time, which keeps it interesting. The amount of publicly available GIS data combined with tools like QGIS and PostGIS can be a big time saver. I don't work in the space, but occasionally run into problems requiring some form of support for geospatial data. Need a list of US cities and postal codes along with their respective coordinates? Easy. Find the dataset, import into QGIS, export to PostGIS. Done.
[+] [-] nobleach|3 years ago|reply
One of my favorite experiences from that era: We were meeting with a few ESRI reps for some integration stuff. The lead hot-shot was on his phone playing around during the meeting. He was basically on autopilot. The other two folks were working with GeoJSON response convertors. I said, "I built one of those with TopoJSON". One guy said, "I've never heard of it". I showed them how it was much more efficient and used splines instead of points. The lead dropped his phone and said, "I need you to tell me MORE about that". I showed them the service. They invited me to lunch, I politely declined and said, "today's my last day so I have a ton of things to wrap up". I do miss that realm sometimes.
[+] [-] whoopdeepoo|3 years ago|reply
https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/11/esri-dominates.html
[+] [-] tomrod|3 years ago|reply
I've had difficulty making it work for production services (especially extensions). Ultimately moved more towards the Python/OSM stack.
Such a fun space.
[+] [-] LeonB|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkamradt|3 years ago|reply
We make 3D Maps of American Landscapes in bronze.
We take Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, do light transformations in QGIS and convert it to an .STL file before additional 3D modeling.
Our latest project was a hairy one doing Oahu (https://terramano.co/blogs/product/oahu-bronze-3d-map)
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danuker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrguyorama|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjwiseman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr337|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavyset_go|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtmiclat|3 years ago|reply
https://blog.qgis.org/2023/01/16/crowd-funding-call-2023/
[+] [-] CSSer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 015UUZn8aEvW|3 years ago|reply
I think a simplified GIS program with stripped-down functionality and an intuitive UI could be a big hit. Think of SketchUp versus SolidWorks or ProE.
[+] [-] bostonvaulter2|3 years ago|reply
Here's a couple maps that I have made about the Honoulu marathon that I wouldn't have made in a more complex/time-intensive piece/powerful piece of software: - https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-TCg9C... - https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-Road-...
[+] [-] trynewideas|3 years ago|reply
Or to put it another way, what's the workflow that a simpler, more opinionated interface would solve, and what features could or would you sacrifice for it?
[+] [-] AlbertoGP|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Phithagoras|3 years ago|reply
These two already dominate more casual mapping
[+] [-] hummus_bae|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mastax|3 years ago|reply
One thing that's frustrated me, and I want to make sure it isn't a misconfiguration on my end, is that QGIS feels really slow. For example, I have a 150MB geojson file which has 300,000 points with associated metadata. Even when I'm zoomed in such that I can only see a few thousand points at a time, if I pan the map over by 50% it takes at least 10 seconds before it loads in the new points. Many long operations seem to take place synchronously on the UI thread, so the whole app is unresponsive while they take place. Clicking the drop down arrow on a PostGIS Schema to view the tables spins for several minutes. No other Postgres tool I have takes that long, so it's not the database. The PostGIS import/export tools were also extremely slow and didn't have progress bars. I'm using 3.24 currently. I don't want to rag on it too hard, but it's really hampered my enthusiasm for working with maps and GIS.
[+] [-] amluto|3 years ago|reply
As far as I can tell, QGIS has no particular understanding of either a coordinate relative to the (moving!) crust or of a coordinate in space-time that can be projected to space at future or past times. Surely this should be a thing!
I found HTDP, a web tool that can shift coordinates forward and back in time:
https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/Htdp/Htdp.shtml
And I found this discussion:
https://www.gpsworld.com/the-effects-of-tectonic-plate-movem...
But I haven’t found anything easy to use.
(I have an RTK-capable GPS and NTRIP data via UNAVCO from a nearby CORS station. I was hoping that storing position relative to such-and-such CORS station as it was on such—and-such date would be straightforwardly doable in QGIS.)
[+] [-] LeonB|3 years ago|reply
I know that the coordinate systems get revised every few years. In Australia we used to use AGD83 then it was revised to GDA94 and more recently to GDA2020 — and this was to account for tectonic shifts. And there’s calculations for transforming from one to the other.
That’s the only clues I have on that side of things and I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve known.
[+] [-] somat|3 years ago|reply
Perhaps that would work for you. because while the plate is shifting with respect to the globe, everything on that plate will maintain the same relative position.
[+] [-] ad404b8a372f2b9|3 years ago|reply
I'd kill to find a full remote job doing that.
[+] [-] vsharma-next|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twelvechairs|3 years ago|reply
A couple of packages used by qgis worth calling out - postgis which really grew up with qgis, and pdal which is a relatively new but incredible package for working with point cloud data.
[+] [-] Helmut10001|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n8cpdx|3 years ago|reply
QGIS is great software, and I respect what they're doing.
ArcGIS Online is a pretty great option and the Living Atlas [1] makes it really easy to consume a lot of data (a bunch of NASA datasets were recently added) and make cool maps. ArcGIS Online ends up being almost like Dropbox for geographic data, but instead of just files you can get full services, and a suite of apps for taking advantage of the services. That includes taking maps offline, making field edits, and syncing them (although that starts to cost money).
You can try the map tool without signing in, and that gives you a good idea of what you can do in the browser (custom popups, charts, tables, filtering, symbology, clustering, cartographic blending, etc). https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=dece...
The personal use subscription is $100/year and includes the full desktop software and cloud storage. [2]
[1] https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/#d=2 [2] https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-for-person...
edit: forgot to mention there is a great developer story: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/
[+] [-] erremerre|3 years ago|reply
ArcGIS then proceeds to apply symbology one layer at a time, taking between 30 to 75 seconds per layer to apply it.
In QGIS, right click in layer, copy symbology, select other layers right click, paste symbology. Done in 3 seconds.
And like that I could be hours and hours talking about similar experiences.
ArcGIS might be much more powerful, but honestly it isn't worth spending 45 minutes to what in QGIS can be done in 5 minutes.
[+] [-] clumsysmurf|3 years ago|reply
Are there any plans for a native macOS version? For someone that wants to learn more about GIS in general, does the web version have what is needed?
[+] [-] kilolima|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cavisne|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sideband|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyarkles|3 years ago|reply
At this point I didn’t even know about QGIS, but I was happy that instead of reinventing the wheel I already had well-defined file formats etc. to work with. QGIS came a little bit later when I had a bunch of data to analyze. My image metadata wasn’t exactly right for QGIS (and couldn’t have been done that way in real-time anyway), but a 3-line shell script using GDAL converted all of my images into something QGIS could load and draw directly overlaid on top of Google Maps. My flight plans were all done in annotated GeoJSON, which QGIS happily loaded as-is and helpfully split it into the layers I had used under the hood as my data encoding. There were a couple of files that were just plain-old CSV, and QGIS happily ingested those and drew them as points and lines and line segments as appropriate.
It’s phenomenally good. Some other people in this discussion have mentioned that the UI is a bit rough and I can’t disagree with that, although I feel the same way about the commercial tools too. It’s a power tool for sure, but it doesn’t take too long to figure out the quirks and build yourself a workflow.
[+] [-] crtified|3 years ago|reply
Then, about a year ago, after several years away from the scene, I got some mojo back and started investigating modern QGIS. I was very pleasantly surprised, it immediately felt like an upgrade from what I used to use. And also felt like coming home, in that it was obvious and intuitive how to accomplish the standard functions. If someone had put me in (that famous thing) a blindfolded time machine for a zero-year trip, popped me out, put me in front of QGIS and said "Welcome! This is ArcGIS 9.6!", it wouldn't have been at all unbelievable. If you know what I mean.
No it's not perfect. Casually and hastily wing your way around a project, copypasting here and there, setting up all kinds of parameters and advanced display bits&bobs, and - like most complex geospatial software - you'll, once in awhile, find yourself unceremoniously dumped out onto the desktop with a software error. So a highly robust and restore-able workflow is still essential. But regardless it's up there with the very best packages I've ever used.
[+] [-] Bedon292|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anakaine|3 years ago|reply
Importantly, a good deal, though not all, of the infuriatingly frustrating "random esri error for who knows what reason" issues have been resolved, and continue to improve.
[+] [-] geenew|3 years ago|reply
Their licensing isn't perfect - the QGIS installer, for example, more-or-less requires acceptance of a few free-as-in-beer but still proprietary licenses, which are used for some specific raster formats. Still, it's one of the great free software success stories, I think.
It definitely feels like they will eventually displace ESRI. Most shops will probably keep ESRI around for some format conversions or niche tasks. However, the day-to-day desktop GIS is almost exclusively QGIS in the places I've worked, if only because you can throw it on any machine you want to without worrying about licensing.
[+] [-] otter-in-a-suit|3 years ago|reply
Very cool to hear that QGIS is such a prominent piece of software in professional settings! I’m just a software/data engineer who dabbles in this stuff for fun, so I had no idea. Lots of comments here asserting the same thing.
It would be amazing to see OSS (even though not truly FOSS) replace industry giants. I see this happening a lot in my space, where a lot of OSS (mostly Apache, some MIT and consorts) overtakes commercial offerings.
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukeqsee|3 years ago|reply
I use it daily, and frequently, for all sorts of work building a location API SaaS company. It's a sterling success of open source, on par with as impactful as Linux, for the geospatial world (IMO).
[+] [-] nerdponx|3 years ago|reply
I tried to perform what I thought were basic tasks of drawing a few line segments and measuring geodesic distances between two points, but I needed a janky plugin for the former and never figured out how to do the latter.
I really do want to learn it however, since it's a lot easier sometimes to work interactively than doing everything in Python code, and I know QGIS is supposed to be a very powerful tool in general.
[+] [-] jt_b|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Phithagoras|3 years ago|reply
The educational world is pretty split between ArcGIS and QGIS. Students don't want to pay over $100 for a yearly ArGIS student license, but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS. Progress is slower in industry, especially in larger companies. Other critical software like Autodesk, Vulcan, DESWICK, MODFLOW, and Leapfrog already work (somewhat) smoothly with ArcGIS.
QGIS is just another thing to go wrong in managers minds, and there is zero opensource progress in developing applications as powerful as QGIS in geomatics adjacent fields.
[+] [-] heliodor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanbernstein|3 years ago|reply
From what I understood, qgis was doing its job properly. It was a neat tool. I guess the whole stack for this use case was just too fragile.
[+] [-] jFriedensreich|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harabat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeonB|3 years ago|reply
QGis is great, lots of tools are nice. Generally ESRI sucks up all the oxygen and leaves not enough for innovation and implementations from anyone else. There are a lot of features and capabilities needed in the Geospatial world that do not have reliable, rock-solid open source implementations. (I could’ve provided examples a few years ago but now I’ve forgotten the important details and only have opinions left)
[+] [-] idleprocess|3 years ago|reply