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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 had fun working with QGIS some years ago, connecting it to GeoServer, mapserver, importing shapefiles, and customizing a few maps. I didn't use as much as the GIS engineers I worked with, but it was definitely a great open source tool.
I had to use ArcGIS too, and while sometimes it performed well, when it didn't it was quite painful to have to deal with the local vendor to implement our features, and troubleshoot bugs in their software.
The ArcGIS tile dataset is good, but the software had favorite versions of Adobe Acrobat to remain stable. It must have improved if people still use it =3
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...
qgis is the best gis software ever... i use it weekly, almost daily.
my next move would be to learn how to make my own plugins.
ps: i'm a forester, fwiw :)
Also in forestry.
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.
yeah! qfield rocks... it got way better the last few months. it starts being part of my daily routine as well.
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.
ooo what plugins does a forester need? (just curious cuz forestry is an interest of mine)
my partner is working on a piece of software to predict late frosting for a data science company (it kills your seedling plantations, if you are into that sort of thing, i don't but sometimes the client wants it) so i was considering adding that to qgis as the data is available freely.
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?)
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.
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?
It appears so, the release is tracked here and isn't complete: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/milestone/226
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.
It's 2026, serving semi-static webpages should be a solved problem for at least 30 years. I'm still puzzled that HN-hug-of-death is a thing.
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?
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.
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 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!
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 work with and contribute to a QGIS plugin that manage water and sewage network data. Together with PostGIS, it's a powerful tool.
I used it to write papers about glaciovolcanism early in my career. Later, I used it to study caves on the Moon.
all the forests i managed have a complete qgis cartography: species plots, age plots, density/volume, etc. also i produce maps for the workers to get to the spot i need them to do stuff: log, make a road, plant treelings, survey a pond, whatever.
I've used it for gixapixel scale rendering projects. Giant wall murals at 300 DPI.
QGIS is incredibly powerful.
I used it to examine results of objects a model detected out of an aerial images
Make maps of distant relatives' locations for a genealogy project
QGIS is one of the small number of truly great open source desktop apps.
Another project that makes me want an equivalent for 2D or 3D CAD! CAD is missing a QGIS or Blender…
Congrats to QGIS team, looking forward to native apple silicon support
I don't know about Blender, but for QGIS I think open or at least well known formats are what gave it a chance to compete against ArcGIS.
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.
I believe in freecad! It's not there yet, but the latest release is a lot of progress!
When I finally Get Around To™ learning CAD, I'll definitely invest my time in FreeCAD.
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.
in france the lidar collection of data is almost entirely done, we can get numerical model of the terrain and tree heights, it's awesome in qgis!
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!
It’s even a residential IP from a German tier 1 ISP, as reputable as it gets. Works fine on computers and for everyone around me.
But somehow, Turnstile seems to think that traffic from a Linux phone == robot traffic.
[flagged]
Your comment breaks multiple site rules... please don't.
I think ra is complaining because changlog.qgis.org appears to be inaccessible. HN hug of death I guess. qgis.org itself seems fine.
Crafted by Rajat
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