QGIS has come of age!

Surely, QGIS (previously Quantum GIS) has come of age!

That is the statement I can make without fear or favor. All this because of the new functionality that come with QGIS 2.4. Frankly, I cannot hide my excitement at these developments.

I will not enumerate the new exciting functionality, but suffice to say that one of my biggest - if not only - problem with QGIS has been the lack of a good tool for generating good presentation-quality maps. I am not sure whether Print Composer has only just improved in QGIS 2.4, but I am really thrilled either way.

I have always had reason to fall back to ArcGIS whenever a map output was required, but now, I can achieve exactly the same - if not better - with QGIS. Print Composer is so much fun to use now, and the amount of flexibility it offers is amazing.

Whereas in the past I have had issues with Print Composer in QGIS as pointed out above, it has always been a breeze to use most other QGIS functionality, and in fact most of the geo-processing and data management tools in QGIS have always been so user-friendly compared to ArcGIS. I would sometimes do geo-processing or data-processing in QGIS and only revert to ArcGIS at the point of generating maps.

Now, I have no more worries about buying many licenses for ArcGIS. Just a few licenses will suffice to take care of highly specialized functionality that may only be available in ArcGIS.

The other beauty of QGIS is the vast availability of Python plugins that are very easy to install and use. I think it is safe to say "no turning back" at this point. I will now consider migrating some of my automated Python scripts from ArcGIS to QGIS and preserve ArcGIS licenses for "Super Users" only.

It's all about the power of opensource.

I am happy. What more can I say?