Coming back from Yellowstone has left me slightly adrift. I missed a meeting yesterday as I keep forgetting to add things to my calendar.
So the last time I mentioned Conda was like 2018 and the whole point to the Article was “I can now have two versions of QGIS running on my workstation”. My Linux workstation to be exact. Still in 6 years I haven’t fallen back to Windows because I don’t need to. Technically 10 years but who is counting.
For the last year I’ve been running Fedora. Why? Why not. My first Linux experience was redhat way back when and it’s been interesting to jump back on that platform. So how does that leave my “geo” experience? Things tend to be more available on Debian and Ubuntu.
Fedora tends to stick with the LTR on QGIS – So not bad. It gets updated as the LTR updates. I’ve actually gotten pretty decent at installing Conda and getting the current QGIS version running. I don’t even bother to make an icon – I just conda activate qgis and qgis to get it running from a terminal (after setting up my environment). Overall – I don’t miss running QGIS unstable which is the only thing I’m really missing with this setup.
Another fallout is I’m running a current version of GDAL in Conda and a current version of PDAL in Conda. I’ve heard rumors GRASS may be making an appearance soon. Also what I’ve learned is running QGIS in Conda also gives me QGIS processing tools in Jupyter notebooks….or whatever notebooks the kids are running these days. That’s been a goal for this year – to use notebooks for something. I need some new tools as I’m too comfortable with my current stack. Of Course PostGIS in Docker if I need to do something quick. Then there’s DuckDB.
With the exception of a very very few tools – It doesn’t even matter now what Linux Distro I’m running (well there’s probably some off the wall distro that would matter) for my current toolset. These days I just show up and work and just hope I have electricity if I road trip it to a clients location. I’d also like to use conda to install QGIS on a mac and a windows machine just to say “I did that also”.
You’ll also notice I’m running fortune in my terminal window.
OF COURSE….I mention linux. I’ve been running this setup for nearly 10 years in some shape or fashion. I do have windows running for QuickBooks. I have a VPN setup for my office so I can leave and jump back into my network to get to notes, postgis, issue a invoice, or whatever I need. It’s setup that has served me well over the last bit. Except for the last trip. I could VPN into my office. I couldn’t reach postgis or my other workstation. The only thing I could gather was I’d had some extended power outage EXCEPT the only box I could ping shouldn’t be running. So I dialed a friend and……..
They unplugged a ethernet cable. That may be my sign it’s time to upgrade things and move to the cloud about 10 years too late. We shall see.
