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Comment by ageitgey | Hacker News Reader

QGIS 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!

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QGIS is janky? It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today. Most built-in tools run way faster than AG Pro, and once the move to QT6 with 4.0 is complete this october, we'll finally get native builds on M-series Mac as well.

I couldn't even know where to start listing the upsides compared to ESRI offering, fron PostGIS integration all the way to the simplicity of plugins.

>It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today

lol, the bar is not high. It can be both the smoothest and extremely janky at times. Let's be honest with ourselves here. (and I do agree, it's among the best running... but also janky).

Arcmap is sooo janky. Looks like a refugee from Win 3.1 era with minor cosmetic updates (although I know the engine received big updates 2010-2020).

If people want QGIS to be pretty, just become a member and sponsor that initiative.

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.

its good for teaching, otherwise it may be super clumsy with large layers and this is unsolvable in the near future. ref. ticket.

even so, we must admit, is still the most comprehensive opensource something to compete with esri.

So weird to see this comment. QGIS powering government GIS groups and used by major geoscience and mining companies.. working with national sized vector and raster data.

Have you tried loading 500k features into QGIS? Well, try it and we talk again.

Govs used QGIS as alternative to pricey ESRI subscriptions, but come to realize that it is struggling even as a viewer. Happily latest versions allow simplification of features on the server side, but these are very new QGISs

also take a look here

https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Ao...

I taught myself QGIS for spatial analysis of map data-- coming at it from a coding perspective. It has great Python integration. It's also surprisingly useful as a spreadsheet alternative for certain tasks because it supports a SQL-like interface into CSV data, so you can join CSVs with spatial data or with each other, create views and virtual fields, and so on. Overall, very impressed with the depth, breadth, and ease of use considering how powerful it is.

Check out Atlas.co - kind of like airtable but for spatial data and spatial tools

I used to work at an ISP based in the UK. They also put fibre in the ground. Their entire "design" tool was basically a huge QGIS python plug-in.

It is incredible the flexibility QGIS gives you. By paying a couple of developers the company probably saved millions in software.

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