> brew install micromamba
> mamba install qgis
It's really crazy the number of open geospatial data feeds that exist out there from NASA, NOAA, and ESA. If you're interested in checking any of this stuff out, I highly encourage following Mark Litwinchik's blog, this guy is a legend and he does most of his work with open tools like QGIS and DuckDB
Do you absolutely need `mamba` / `conda`??
Can you use `uv` instead to install QGIS? Any experiences to share?
Thanks!!
For folks working on QGis: thank you
There have been so many random times that QGIS has helped me out over the years. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to it!
even so, we must admit, is still the most comprehensive opensource something to compete with esri.
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...
It is incredible the flexibility QGIS gives you. By paying a couple of developers the company probably saved millions in software.
If people want QGIS to be pretty, just become a member and sponsor that initiative.
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.
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).
Maybe for home or casual use, sure. I use a ~$4500/y Esri license level and it's worth every penny.
Also, plenty of people are still using matlab!
A lot of shops I know (private and public) will use ArcGIS still, but I'm noticing an increasing number of people (particularly younger researchers/analysts) who are exclusively using QGIS.
QGIS is powerful and full featured, but it is admittedly a bit rusty around the edges, especially when working with very large datasets. If they keep working on fixing some of the sharpest edges I think it will go on to have a good future. Just in the past few years I've noticed significant improvement.
In many ways it feels like Blender -- long ignored and dismissed, but slowly but surely improved over time, and then suddenly became quite a big deal.
I won’t comment on market share, but even if theoretically QGIS totally displaced ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap/ArcGIS on the desktop, the arena of competition has shifted to ArcGIS Online and its competitors. And once you’re in ArcGIS Online, Pro becomes the convenient choice for desktop editing.
LibreOffice could be miles better than Office on desktop, but the competition is lost because Office on desktop is just an accessory for Office 365 (which competes with Google Docs/Drive).
Disclosure: I work at Esri.
It would be nice to have better support for browser-based sharing and editing, but the desktop-based parts are there already.
The comparison still works in some ways though, because ArcGIS is selling you both the software (ArcGIS Pro, Map Viewer, Field Maps, etc) and the backing services (hosted feature services, basemaps, locators, etc), similar to how Office is selling you data hosting, sharing, and mobile + web app integration.
You can accomplish the same things with QGIS, GeoServer, QField, etc, but then you’re in the position of building a GIS from parts. Whereas with ArcGIS, setting up a new map and database (feature service) for data collection is a point-click workflow.
Of course you pay a premium for that level of integration.
Theres other complexity too, like 'how to avoid silent failures in ArcGIS Pro and Hosting Server'.
Case in point: say you use amazon RDS. URL for that object is name.customerID.environment.amazonrds.com . Its a long URL. Now you go into hostingServer/ArcGIS/manager and go set this as a data source. You can validate the data source and everything's fine...
Until your analysts add projects in RDS and go past some secret legacy arbitrary length of DNS+path. And if you do? Things will silently break, data won't come into ArcGIS Pro right. Anomalous errors.
Now, if you change the RDS DNS name to an IP address, all those problems go away! Everything's fixed, analysts are happy, and none are the wiser.
Until, Amazon does maintenance on your RDS, changing your IP address. Then, your environment then breaks for no good reason, and you have to be keenly aware to go to server manager and MANUALLY rerun data store check.
And no, ArcGIS monitor can't do this.
And... Dont even start me on 80070035. That "premium" support ticket was rotting for 5 weeks, until I ran into an engineer on LinkedIN, who solved it in 30 seconds.
For me the real ongoing question is the role of MapBox, MapLibre, to some extent Google Maps API, and other web-first solutions. It's difficult for Esri to connect with the average web developer or researcher who just wants to start with clickable pins on a map.
GDAL should be front and center. It's the xkcd 2347 of earth observation and geographical information systems
The sqlite db alone that's packaged with PROJ is a pillar of knowledge that one can only marvel at. The most authoritative and wide-ranging collection of projection/datum information I'm aware of.
and also that qgis installs 1g+ of all these goodies tied together.
A lot of things are evolving though in the gis world. You can now, even in the browser, render huge datasets with geoparquet, geoarrow, wasm and webgl.
I just used leaflet, it was fine
spatialite is also good enough as a spatial database
unless you are doing complex stuff with GIS data, I don't see the point of using such a large software
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 border region between two datasets from different national bodies and looking up some property borders I can really recommend it. Took me less than an afternoon to get started
It makes the work a lot of fun!
The fact Arc gives you a transparent live preview of where your image will end up is 1000x better than QGISs, "save a tiff, load it, check it, do it again" approach.
Cant's speak much for arcgis, but it is bloated usually for me so I use it sparingly.
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 administer it, HA isn't really HA. Theres tons of footguns in how they implement HA that makes it a SPOF.
Also, for relevancy, I was the one who worked with one of their engineers and showed that WebAdapters (iis reverse proxy for AGE) could be installed multiply on the same machine, using SNI. 11.2 was the first to include my contribution to that.
Edit: gotta love the -1s. What do you all want? Screenshots of my account on my.esri.com? Pictures of Portal and the Linux console they're running on? The fact its 80% Apache Tomcat and Java, with the rest Python3? Or how about the 300 ish npm modules, 80 of which on the last security scan I did showed compromise?
Everything I said was completely true. This is what I'm paid to run. Can't say who, cause we can't edit posts after 1 or so hours.
I would LOVE to push FLOSS everywhere. QGIS would mostly replace ArcGIS Pro, with exception of things like Experience Builder and other weird vertical tools. But yeah. I know this industry. Even met Jack a few times.
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.
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?
It’s roughly the same story as with MS Office vs its alternatives. They exist, but 99% of enterprises will use only the Microsoft suite.
The Danger Man!
Yes, I know his name is Jack Dangermond.
I'm not saying that it can't run in Linux, I'm saying there is no native binary for Linux.
They have bash scripts that starts the windows executables in wine.
You can see that when you read the scripts or in htop.
This isn’t about what platform an enterprise hosts its cloud offerings on. That barely affects the customer experience, outside of lock-in situations.
The concern was on OS support for customer-run software.
Yes, it has a better UI than ArcGIS, and uses less memory, but only slightly so. It still looks like it escaped from 1995's Neckbeard Labs, is clunky as heck, and eats tons of memory as well.
It's still a great piece of software, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade it for any other GIS tool. But there's a long way to go for GIS software.
if you are a web based first, you have even better options to build and extend
kepler, protomaps, maplibre-gl-js
https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js
the rest can be found on great Qiusheng Wu’s (aka @giswqs) Geo/GeoAI tutorials channels and repos
https://www.youtube.com/@giswqs/videos
but what really amazed me is how geo spatial support is growing inside of databases recently
https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/core_extensions/spatial/overv...
all mighty postgis https://postgis.net/docs/manual-3.5/postgis_cheatsheet-en.ht...
https://sedona.apache.org/latest/
https://geoparquet.org/releases/v1.0.0/
and many unlocked dataset compare to other industries
https://docs.overturemaps.org/getting-data/duckdb/
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
lot great webtools are comming for sure and you still can be 100% of most of your geospatial pipeline
p.s. want to extend the above list with self-hosted tools with minimum or none dependencies on paid APIs, and recommendations are greatly appreciated
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 gentle/great tutorials/guides?
I know this isn’t a “vpn software before tailscale” kind of situation. But, you know?
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.
It’s made for some really streamlined analysis.
20 minutes later it had every piece of data I could possibly want placed onto the parcel on the map. It felt magical.
Massed rows of toolbars with tiny icons, lots of unintuitive behaviour, and a few weird quirks.
It's a very powerful tool, but so much of its utility is completely inaccessible without tutorials and videos to explain it.
QGIS is an odd duck. Part of the complexity of using it is the fundamental complexity of GIS software. There’s way more background info that I didn’t know (what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything without a bunch more info?!) that’s necessary to use it effectively. All of the excellent UI in the world won’t save you if you’re not using the right coordinate system.
On the other hand… yeah, it definitely could use some love. I consider myself in roughly the amateur power user category. I don’t use it every day, but when I do fire it up once or twice a month I’m doing some heavy data analysis with it. Every time I do that I end up tripping over three or four things that seem like they should be obvious to do but aren’t. And man oh man… if there was a single bug I would love to fix: highlighted points, whether selected through the selection UI or through the data table… should always have a higher Z-order than the other points around them. The fact that you can select a bunch of points and not see them highlighted… so frustrating. You can go in and change the symbology to fix that in a number of ways but dammit it should work right out of the box. /rant
Is the more info just the coordinate system like WGS84, or am I missing something else?
The worst part is that if you don’t get it exactly right, you’ll still get answers that look right but are shifted by maybe 1-3m. As an example, we had a field team out with a Trimble survey stick with RTK (nominal accuracy 1-2cm) that they were using to cross-check data from our aerial survey platform. We had laid out a bunch of targets on the ground, which they surveyed the corners for. Most of the time there was a fantastic match between the aerial survey data and the ground truth data, but occasionally there was a pretty large offset. As I discovered WAY too late, exactly one of the cellphones that ran the Trimble app had its coordinate system set to one of the Canadian CSRS frames instead of WGS84: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/science-data/science-res...
Edit: naturally, they just handed me the coordinates in a CSV file that they’d captured. The Trimble app + whatever data collection app didn’t actually record the reference frame.
That's sort of true, but QGIS could do a much better job of helping you manage this stuff, figuring out the right CRS, helping you make sense of clashing CRS'es etc.
> highlighted points, whether selected through the selection UI or through the data table… should always have a higher Z-order than the other points around them
I haven't come across that one much, but generally I wish the UI around querying data was much better. First it takes me ages to find the one specific tiny little button which lets you query stuff, then you have to remember to pick which layer you want to query, etc etc.
It's the most obvious mode, and should be the default, and not buried amongst a dozen other icons I'll never use.
As far as learning curve, I agree, but I have had a lot of luck as a beginner asking ChatGPT how to use qgis to do specific tasks and it walked me through them in detail correctly.
[1] https://www.lizmap.com/en/
Stallman approved.
fithisux•4mo ago