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An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
ArcGIS is the proprietary industry standard, but QGIS is catching up. I personally don’t like Arc and have only used it when I was in industry. Even in academia colleges pay for ArcGIS but I just use QGIS.
You can also customize QGIS easily and there’re a lot of community plugins. And works well with other open source tools or CLI tools.
Main thing that makes Arc popular in industry is the liability. They can claim they used the best available industry standard software, so the errors are not their fault, and deflect it to the software company. While with open-source alternatives they might be held liable. It’s not a problem if the open source is the standard. But that only happens when they were there first, hard to do it otherwise.