@pcrock thanks, I appreciate a professional point of view!
Unfortunately I'm not experienced enough to make a case with my prof about using QGIS... hell, I can't even use it, as it won't install on debian and my pcs are not good enough for Windows VMs to run
@arteteco Wow, really? I figured QGIS would work better on Linux than Windows.
Reading their download page for Debian, it does sound a bit... unstable. Did you try installing the Long Term Support version (3.10 Coruña)?
@pcrock No yeah, maybe I wrote it bad, QGIS works very well, it's ArcGIS that is basically impossible to install.
So I can't really follow my GIS lessons and I can't compare the two... I'm learning QGIS with online tutorial, so far it's been a great experience!
@arteteco Lol my GIS teacher only use ArcGis too. I like some things of ArcGis like geostatistics tools and some tools but in QGIS some things are better
@arteteco At my work, we started out using ArcGIS all the time because all our clients use it and other ESRI products extensively.
We now almost exclusively use QGIS. We find the user interface much simpler, and in recent months / years it has added support for features that even ArcGIS lacks. Compatibility with ESRI proprietary file formats is also generally pretty good.
That said, we don't do a ton of visualisation stuff. More just data manipulation.