QGIS

Raised as a usability problem by 22 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with QGIS, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 24 complaints

Drawing polygons interactively is extremely slow and laggy2026-07-06
Toolbar icons are opaque to new users, so they must hunt for each action2026-01-05
Report creation requires exporting PDFs and manually pulling plans into Word, which is messy2025-10-24
Query button is hard to find among many icons, and layer selection is extra work2025-09-17
Selected points stay hidden behind others, so the user cannot see what is selected2025-09-13
The Rosetta-translated QGIS binary on Apple silicon was almost unusable2025-09-13
Cluttered toolbars with tiny icons and unintuitive behaviour; features need tutorials to find2025-09-12
Overly complex for simple choropleth maps2024-06-14
Took most of a year to figure out how to draw geometry2024-01-14
Hard to remember where features are and how to do tasks2023-02-11
Default setting queries whole tables with no progress bar, making the app hang on dropdowns2023-02-11
Commenter cannot intuit how to do anything in QGIS and must search for every task2023-02-11
Requires trained GIS expertise and a long multi-step process that lay users can't easily follow2023-02-11
Very slow with large datasets, loads and draws every feature, single-core2023-02-11
Separate interfaces per use case, but tasks cross over between them2023-02-11
Software crashes unexpectedly to desktop during complex projects2023-02-10
Panning to load new points takes 10+ seconds and the app freezes during operations2023-02-10
Slow to redraw when zooming into large datasets with millions of features2023-02-10
Hard to learn; important functions buried in non-intuitive menus2023-02-10
Map projection makes spatial operations behave unintuitively for users2022-10-21
Display scaling at 175% makes the application effectively unusable2021-04-11
Every digit typed into the Classes box freezes the whole app while a dataset is processed2021-02-03
Can't get mobile version to work with shapefile data; desktop start icon won't be created2020-09-23
Has to repeat many clicks by hand when input data changes2017-09-18