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Avoid Google Maps with Gnome Maps on GNU/Linux
- fovc 9y agoWhat is the advantage of using Gnome Maps over just OpenStreetMap.org? From their website[1], it seems like it's still just a client for the various services
- korginator 9y agoIt's just another option, it's about choice. You could very well use maps.me as I do on Android, or any of the other solutions.
- upofadown 9y agoAppears to be integrated route planning and satellite view.
- bebop 9y agoThe OpenStreetMap.org application is only supposed to be used for editing OSM data. It is not supposed to be used as a gmaps alternative. For that you should take the Planet OSM data and create a map service (WMS or similar) yourself.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe development of the website is definitely focused on helping mappers. It's fine for individuals to use it for whatever though.
- bebop 9y agoI guess it depends on how you define "heavy use". According to their policy, you should not distribute any application that uses their tile server. https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
- maxerickson 9y agoSure. The OP is talking about individuals directly using the website as a map though. (I've added "for individuals" to my first comment)
- rmc 9y agoEh not really. The OSM community hasn't really settled on what OSM.org is supposed to do. It's very definitely made for regular end users in mind. So you can use it for that.
- everybodyknows 9y agoGnome Maps can respond to user pan/zoom much faster. G-Maps is hooked in to MapBox's commercial-scale map tile service, which in turn delegates the bulk work to servers run by cloudfront.net. Run tcpdump to see this.
- progval 9y agoGnome Maps is a lot faster than the website.
- korginator 9y agoMuch as I would like to avoid google, the routing on OSM or graphhopper leaves a lot to be desired. There's no routing using public transport. Half the buildings I've tried looking up either don't exist on OSM / Gnome maps, or result in an address half-way across the globe. That said, I prefer using HERE maps as it works very well in offline mode, including voice navigation, compared to anything else I've tried. The fact is that getting a global mapping and navigation solution right takes tremendous effort and money (Apple can tell you a lot about how their attempts worked out for them), and I want an application that I can trust and that just works when I'm behind the wheel or at an unfamiliar location. I'm sure OSM and alternatives will continue to improve over the years, and I'll play with them occasionally, but I will still go back to HERE, waze or google maps for the important stuff.
- aesh2Xa1 9y agoYou can contribute better directions/addresses!
- diggan 9y agoSo how do you actually do this? Can you just open up Google Maps with OSM side-by-side and copy addresses? Or you need to source it from somewhere else?
- kuschku 9y agoYou need to source it from somewhere else, usually your own knowledge – go to places, photograph them, add them in OSM.
- jorvi 9y agoDespite what others might tell you, Google does not own addresses and associated information (opening hours, phone number etc.), so you’re free to copy them side-by-side. Uploaded photos are a no-go though. Edit: for all people blindly ramming that downvote button, see my explanation below.
- linkmotif 9y ago> I was scrolling around the world, setting directions for how to cross Russia by foot (which let me tell you in case you ever wondered, should take roughly 60 hours, depending on locations used) in a matter of moments, and it really was quite easy to do. This post lost me here. I couldn’t cross Maryland in 60 hours on foot. Much less Russia. Missing some zeros?
- chx 9y agoCould it be 60 days? Russia has a maximum east-west extent of some 5,600 miles (9,000 km) and a north-south width of 1,500 to 2,500 miles (2,500 to 4,000 km). (According to Encyclopedia Britannica) How long would that take to walk? Let's look at another continent for data.. According to the Pacific Crest Trail Association the Pacific Crest Trail spans 2,650 miles (4,265 kilometers) and the elite athletes can do two months, generally it takes five months. So: 60 days to cross Russia North-to-South is not entirely out of question. And then, who knows what the author meant. If you were to walk from Pattina, Estonia to Rasony, Belarus, that's about 60 hours and almost all of it is in Russia and in a sense it crosses Russia.
- linkmotif 9y agoYeah I’m guessing it must be days. I entered Moscow to Vladivostok into Google Maps (heh) and got 73 days. In reality I’m pretty sure that walk would take me at least half a year. Probably a year.
- chx 9y agoYeah that's just distance divided by speed, I think. That's why I picked the Pacific Trail data instead.
- sverige 9y agoUnfortunately, Gnome Maps does not provide distances in miles. Yes, I could do the math to convert these, but graphhopper already does that for me. So, it's a nice app, but one missing feature makes it practically useless for me.
- privong 9y ago> Unfortunately, Gnome Maps does not provide distances in miles. Yes, I could do the math to convert these, but graphhopper already does that for me. So, it's a nice app, but one missing feature makes it practically useless for me. Without having ever used Gnome Maps or looked at the code, it seems to me that adding this could be a reasonably straight-forward pull request. I'm not necessarily suggesting you yourself should do it, but a quick bug report to this effect would get picked up quickly, I'd hope.
- progval 9y agoThat's an opportunity to start using the metric system!
- audidude 9y agoIt does for me. Sounds like it is likely relying on current locale.
- hjek 9y agoGnome Maps looks great. I wish they would add a local tile cache, like Marble. Not everyone are online all the time.
- nkoren 9y ago> I was scrolling around the world, setting directions for how to cross Russia by foot (which let me tell you in case you ever wondered, should take roughly 60 hours, depending on locations used) Huh, out of curiosity, I just checked Google Maps, and it suggests that walking from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok would take 1,883 hours. That's quite a discrepancy. I suspect that Google is probably more accurate in this instance.
- morsch 9y agoI'm pretty sure he meant to write 60 days (1440 hours).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- morsch 9y agoThe thing is Google Maps is so much more than a pure map, or even a multi-modal routing service. It's also a searchable registry of all kinds of businesses, a review and qa aggregator for everything from mountain peaks to restaurants; a price comparison tool for hotels; an organized photo database where for many restaurants you could, if you wanted to, see a satellite view of a restaurant, aerial footage, then street view imagery and finally photos of individual dishes. The list goes on, I'm sure there are features I've never seen because they are not available where I live. It's probably the most impressive customer facing Google product, and maybe the hardest to replace. That said, I still have both Google Maps and Osmand on my Android device. While it doesn't have the breadth of functionality that Google Maps does, and Osmand's interface takes some getting used to, more often than not OpenStreetMap exceeds Google Maps in terms of accuracy and detail of the pure map data. Which is incredible! So when I'm planning a hike, I use OSM. But during the hike, when I'm searching for a place to have a bite, I use Google.
- rmc 9y ago> But during the hike, when I'm searching for a place to have a bite, I use Google. I hope, when you're on your hike, you add the restaurant to OSM! :) Along with all the other info (wheelchair accessibility, wifi, opening hours etc etc)
- cup-of-tea 9y agoOsmand is a great advanced mapping app but try Maps.me for more like a Google Maps replacement.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago"Google Maps is so much more than a pure map" Which makes it's a shitty pure map. Every time one of those "features" gets in the way of typing in an address and navigating, I want to throw my phone out the window. That stuff should be plug-ins for people that think they need it.
- morsch 9y agoNavigation is not a pure map feature, either.
- everybodyknows 9y agoKills your chosen theme's window preferences, in particular the ability to resize by point-and-drag anywhere along the window border. Gnome calls this behavior the "CSD Initiative": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16241923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16241923
- drivingmenuts 9y agoAnd yet, ads on the site are served up through Google.
- audidude 9y agoIf you're interested in contributing to GNOME Maps, you can install GNOME Builder and run it, click on the Maps icon under "Contribute to an existing project", and then hit the Run button once it clones/opens. You'll have a local build, with all the dependencies met, in an IDE to contribute to the project. Also, http://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers http://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers
- infinity0 9y agoHow does it compare to KDE Marble?
- on_and_off 9y ago>on GNU/Linux that sounds so strange to me. Why target the desktop instead of web/Android/iOS ?
- newnewpdro 9y agoPeople use GNU/Linux, why shouldn't they have a quality native map and navigation application?
- on_and_off 9y agowhy would you use a navigation app on a desktop os ?
- feborges 9y agohttps://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
- newnewpdro 9y agoYou do realize that GNU/Linux also runs computers that aren't anchored to a desk, right? GNOME has been working on improving touch interface support with an eye towards mobile devices for years now. Personally I tend to look up where I'm going prior to leaving rather than relying on turn-by-turn navigation systems. I load up a map, and use navigation features to route my trip, and I personally consider this navigation - just not realtime. Usually I write down the directions on a scrap of paper. Not everyone willfully carries around a surveillance device, and options like GNOME maps makes it possible to still have modern technology at your disposal without participating in these highly invasive ad-funded surveillance systems.
- on_and_off 9y agogood for you, have a pat on the back
- dang 9y ago
- squiggleblaz 9y agoPerhaps someone here can tell me something. I've had another rant, but this is a case of plain wrong information which is different. But I don't know how to go about fixing it. In Australia, addresses are in the form [Street Number and Name], [Locality (i.e. suburb, town, rural district), Postcode State]. Localities are therefore very important. They need to be in any mapping database of Australia, because people will enter addresses in that form because it's what the post office uses and the local councils define. But it looks like someone went to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and downloaded the "State Suburb" boundaries and uploaded them into Open Street Map. "State Suburbs" are not places and not used in addresses. They're statistical regions used for reporting statistics. "State suburbs" are built up of other statistical regions to approximate towns, suburbs and rural districts. They sometimes correspond well enough at a broad level to suburbs in metropolitan areas, but even in densely populated urban areas they can be wrong because what makes statistical sense isn't always the administrative border. In country areas, they take scant regard for locality boundaries. "State Suburbs" should never have been uploaded to the database. (There's an analagous problem with Local Government Areas, which are statistical regions, and municipal districts, which are the territory of a local council. But here the distinction is going to be rarely significant because LGA boundaries are deliberately aligned to municipal district boundaries. Consequently it's more a matter of the source of the authority than the content of the data.) You can go to data.gov.au and download locality boundaries for each state. These are what is wanted. But I have no idea how to do this. I don't really know where to begin. I once asked someone for help about trying to find the right forum to ask for help. But it's daunting. When these online databases contain work that is wrong, it's so hard to fix them. People will be possessive of the work they've done. It's possible some of them have been corrected. Others might have been partially corrected. I just don't see how I can go through and fix them without upsetting anyone. The alternative seems to be to just accept that there's wrong data in there because there's way too many to fix manually, even if I start now and keep going in all my spare time for the rest of my life.
- timv 9y agoThat's not the case in my local area. The suburbs boundaries align quite accurately with the boundaries provided on the local council's GIS. The OSM boundaries are line-strings, so they don't have all the contours from the council, but it's clearly a representation of the real boundary, not the ABS boundary. What areas are you looking at.
- madez 9y agoI'm disappointed that it offers no offline functionality. I'd like to download the map and do all the pathing and rendering locally, because I don't want to transmit over the internet what I'm looking at and where I want to go.
- tjr225 9y agoThe only google service I rely on is their map. I wish there were an alternative.
- craftyguy 9y agoOpenstreetmap. It's an alternative that desperately needs your (and other's) help. There will not be a 1:1 replacement for google maps unless folks put forth some effort. Be a osm contributor today (it's ridiculously easy with Osmand, or maps.me, or many many other clients.)
- beenBoutIT 9y agoI don't understand why anyone would deliberately put themselves at a serious disadvantage by using sub-par map/browser/etc technology in the hopes of somehow limiting Google's ability to gather data. Unless you exist in a vacuum, in the long-run what you're actually doing is failing to take advantage of the data that Google's making accessible to you, at your own expense.