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.
I remember, 10 to twenty years ago, when GIS was still a huge part of my job. QGIS then went from being the "cheap opensource contender" to being my main tool... How much better it was than the previous ones...
Recently I explained to a student that Arc Pro is kind of like the Disney of GIS software. It’s powerful and colorful and very well known, but if you try and do things it doesn’t like, you’re going to have a bad time.
QGIS is my daily driver. It’s so much lighter and so much less bloat, it’s just wildly more efficient. These days I pretty much use Arc for machine learning features.
> if you try and do things it doesn’t like, you’re going to have a bad time.
Also that there's the 'Esri' way of doing things, and the 'platform independent' (more-or-less) way of doing things which do not play well with 'Esri-isms'.
Esri does have some really nice enterprise components though; I haven't yet found a remotely user-friendly open-source equivalent to Workflow Manager Server or Data Interop., or an as-polished ArcGIS Portal yet, though I constantly keep a look out.
QField is getting better and better, too. I wish I knew C++ well enough to help develop it further.
I've worked with developing plugins for QGIS. It's just Python and PyQT, along with a bunch of things provided by QGIS itself. Overall a very pleasant experience, and their docs are pretty good too.
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.
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
Viewing a GPX file that I also view on Osmand (Android). QGIS can be configured to display the POI colors by `type` ("restaurant" is red, etc). Combined with a handrolled script which adds Osmand's non-standard markup, I am granted the superpower of... being able to distinguish between points on both mobile and desktop.
I used it to map out storage locations and refill stations at our online grocery picking stations, then export it to read in using geopandas in order to calculate the shortest distances between all locations!
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?
QGIS is great. One of the truly good open source projects. I used it to successfully extract 3D height data for the mountains next to my hometown. This was not an easy task since the miuntains are on a national border and I had to combine height data from two national sources. It still worked out perfectly fine.
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.
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.
my next move would be to learn how to make my own plugins.
ps: i'm a forester, fwiw :)
Recently I explained to a student that Arc Pro is kind of like the Disney of GIS software. It’s powerful and colorful and very well known, but if you try and do things it doesn’t like, you’re going to have a bad time.
QGIS is my daily driver. It’s so much lighter and so much less bloat, it’s just wildly more efficient. These days I pretty much use Arc for machine learning features.
Also that there's the 'Esri' way of doing things, and the 'platform independent' (more-or-less) way of doing things which do not play well with 'Esri-isms'.
Esri does have some really nice enterprise components though; I haven't yet found a remotely user-friendly open-source equivalent to Workflow Manager Server or Data Interop., or an as-polished ArcGIS Portal yet, though I constantly keep a look out.
QField is getting better and better, too. I wish I knew C++ well enough to help develop it further.
https://github.com/giswater
That page is also down.
Even previous ones, listed on Google when searching "QGIS changelog" are all down. So it's a server error on their side most likely.
Congrats to QGIS team, looking forward to native apple silicon support
For CAD, I think that an strong open format would make things much more easy for FOSS CAD software. I can see this starting happening with BIM.