[HN Gopher] QGIS 4.0
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QGIS 4.0
Author : jonbaer
Score : 191 points
Date : 2026-03-07 08:53 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (changelog.qgis.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (changelog.qgis.org)
| realA12l wrote:
| 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?
| mrjay42 wrote:
| https://changelog.qgis.org
|
| 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.
| erikerikson wrote:
| It appears so, the release is tracked here and isn't complete:
| https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/milestone/226
| alfanick wrote:
| 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.
| dhx wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260303144625/https://changelog...
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| hern42 wrote:
| 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!
| aspenmayer wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260303144625/https://changelog...
| ra wrote:
| there's really no excuse for not running cloudflare at least it
| is 2026.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| 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.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| 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!
| Hackbraten wrote:
| 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.
| gehsty wrote:
| 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
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I believe in freecad! It's not there yet, but the latest
| release is a lot of progress!
| sheiyei wrote:
| When I finally Get Around To(tm) learning CAD, I'll
| definitely invest my time in FreeCAD.
| pahbloo wrote:
| 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.
| hern42 wrote:
| 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 :)
| jyoung789 wrote:
| 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.
| misswaterfairy wrote:
| > 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.
| hern42 wrote:
| yeah! qfield rocks... it got way better the last few
| months. it starts being part of my daily routine as well.
| jadedtuna wrote:
| 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.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| ooo what plugins does a forester need? (just curious cuz
| forestry is an interest of mine)
| hern42 wrote:
| 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.
| boredemployee wrote:
| 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
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I used it to write papers about glaciovolcanism early in my
| career. Later, I used it to study caves on the Moon.
| tomtom1337 wrote:
| 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!
| null_deref wrote:
| I used it to examine results of objects a model detected out of
| an aerial images
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Make maps of distant relatives' locations for a genealogy
| project
| bluebarbet wrote:
| 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.
| pahbloo wrote:
| I work with and contribute to a QGIS plugin that manage water
| and sewage network data. Together with PostGIS, it's a powerful
| tool.
|
| https://github.com/giswater
| jschrf wrote:
| I've used it for gixapixel scale rendering projects. Giant wall
| murals at 300 DPI.
|
| QGIS is incredibly powerful.
| hern42 wrote:
| 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.
| thetoon wrote:
| 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...
| mastermage wrote:
| 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.
| etskinner wrote:
| Why did you need circular maps?
| ogig wrote:
| 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.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| 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.
| apexalpha wrote:
| 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.
| ascorbic wrote:
| QGIS is one of the small number of truly great open source
| desktop apps.
| zzleeper wrote:
| 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?)
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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.
| kinow wrote:
| 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.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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
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(page generated 2026-03-07 23:01 UTC)