RE: Manifold is the only app keeping me on Windows

rk — Wed, 07 May 2025 15:18:56 GMT

I have an older PC at home. I cannot install W11. And frankly, I'd like to switch to Linux anyway. Manifold is really the only app I would seriously miss. I do not hate W, maybe I would miss something else also more than I think would. I just feel tired (of W).

Thoughts?

RE: Manifold is the only app keeping me on Windows

dchall8 — Thu, 08 May 2025 19:58:54 GMT

Way back when Manifold is the program that converted me from a Mac to Windows. Now I'm sorta used to it. My wife has a Mac and I'm really no help to her when she needs advice on how to do something.

RE: Manifold is the only app keeping me on Windows

joebocop — Fri, 09 May 2025 05:50:15 GMT

Windows 10 support ends in October, so you may feel compelled to update the hardware stack before then anyway. Windows 11 has a good feel to it though; WSL2 and Docker and VSCode, etc, you'll probably enjoy. All the new .net core 'stuff', as well, which Manifold may yet exploit.

It's an interesting thought, where Windows desktop sits in the future of "GIS" workflows. The era of profitable ESRI button-pushing does seem to have drawn to a close, and much of the GIS action can happen on *nix, or in the browser now. Check job postings on any website and you quickly get the sense that those traditional "analyst" roles that require rote interaction with an established desktop application 1) pay poorly, and 2) are dead ends, career-wise. Do a search for jobs requiring expertise or experience with Manifold (in English-language, anyway) and you might not find anything at all. SuperMap? I couldn't decipher the search results, but they have a linux desktop version at least.

With Release 9 updates on hiatus I started using other geospatial tools more frequently, and I've found that for the bulk of the work I do there are no longer any real performance advantages to running *everything* through Manifold. The gdal spatial joins in duckdb outperform the GeomOverlay* functions on my machine (with my data sizes, ymmv, etc etc), and I don't do much raster work outside of merging and exporting as COGs, which doesn't leverage Manifold's vaunted GPU parallelism value proposition.

I recently started using Uber's Kepler.gl library to handle data viz on millions of points, but that's something Manifold still performs better than other desktop apps I've tried.

This guy Drew figures that geospatial as an industry is undergoing a revival, owing to new tools and techniques (none of which requires a Windows license to execute, at any scale), but which make maximum use of SQL. Sounds familiar!

Dewey also does some heavy lifting of large local vector data sets, porting Google's Geography functions over to duckdb (and also references Art's speed comparison using some large-ish vector data!).

None of these shiny new things 'requires' Windows in any sense, so you could probably survive without it (and without Manifold), but then you'd also miss out on having a reason to visit georeference.org.

RE: Manifold is the only app keeping me on Windows

dchall8 — Sun, 11 May 2025 18:44:35 GMT

Thanks for the tip on when to "upgrade" to Win 11. Manifold's support has always driven that decision for me.

Manifold Community Site: Manifold is the only app keeping me on Windows

RE: Manifold is the only app keeping me on Windows

RE: Manifold is the only app keeping me on Windows

RE: Manifold is the only app keeping me on Windows

RE: Manifold is the only app keeping me on Windows