Yes, I’ve populated most of my local area, and every time I go for a walk or bike ride, I add as much detail that I can. I also find it very enjoyable and it’s pretty cool to see features I added show up in all kinds of mapping services that use its data
Osm now has the clearest and most detailed maps for walking that I know, and I use them in preference to the UK’s ordnance survey maps, which don’t scale so well on electronic devices.
Back before I felt comfortable taking my expensive smartphones running with me for the GPS purposes, I’d manually enter my running routes into RunKeeper. I don’t know if they still use it, but back then their mapping was powered by OpenStreetMap. I’d add in stuff like sidewalks and trails that weren’t on the map yet to make my manual entries easier. I liked doing this–it was kind of fun and I felt good contributing my knowledge of my local unimportant suburb to the world.
I’ve been surprised at how much is already on there, though. Out of curiosity I went to look at the map for my mom’s hometown of ~500 people in the middle of nowhere and found it surprisingly complete.
I still like OpenStreetMap, but don’t use it as much anymore. I wish there was a navigation app that used OSM data and was able to give me audio cues (e.g. “turn left at the next exit”), because that’s 99% of my map use these days. (And if there is one that I don’t know about, please let me know!)
Pokemon Go uses OSM for the map data in the game. I've submitted park trails by tracing them in the satellite view and now the game has all the trails.
OsmAnd actually works pretty well in my experience, at least in the UK. It's not always up to date or fully-detailed but it's far from useless and I appreciate that. It's my primary map program on my phone.
Sounds like I might be the youngest here lol. I started with Ubuntu 11.04 which I would live boot off CD in my school laptop. After I got my own laptop with Windows 8, I used Windows for a good long while until the thing got super slow after having windows 10 for a while. That’s when I got back in to linux.
Ubuntu ~2005/2006. I was introduced to Linux by my friend’s older brother in highschool, then proceeded to nuke the windows install on my parents’ PC.
That’s when they decided to buy me a laptop, which I dualbooted ubuntu on. Now almost two decades later, I’m a devops engineer working professionally with Linux
I was starting in similar years, some time in high school (03-07) I set up a dual boot with Ubuntu. I've dabbled on and off since. Usually put Ubuntu on old laptops to give em some more life, current work laptop is that way. It's never been my primary OS. But I've had either a dual boot or laptop running it most years since then.
Yes and yes! Couldn't contribute that much but I try to
I think having a highly important FOSS project that is not controlled by a company known for shutting down many of its beloved products (I'm talking about you Google) is pretty nice...
Also I think map quality is location-dependent. I live in a large metropolitan area in Southern US; OSM is usable, but there are no house/building numbers, and a good number of businesses are missing. In contrast I think the map is a lot better in Chicago which is a lot more pedestrian-friendly? Also, when I looked at Germany it seems OSM is on-par or better than Google Maps... in fact one of the larger rental websites use OSM instead of Google Maps (imagine Zillow doing it in US lol)
I used OSMAnd for a while before I got a data plan but found it next to useless as it would routinely take nearly an hour (not even joking) to figure out where I was.
I’ve been a Mac guy since 1985 but I’ve always had additional machines running other OSes (including Windows). My first Linux experience was with Yggdrasil, which my small company was trying out. We never got it to boot. After that, it was early Red Hat, which I ran for years until the hardware I was using died. After that, it was various versions of Ubuntu on machines at work. Now I’ve got a couple of Raspberry Pis running Raspian.
OsmAnd is my family’s go-to app for navigation. I didn’t notice it missing information compared to Google Maps. The opposite really, with several hiking trails or small side-roads not being on Google some years ago. The only issue it has is navigation for more than ~200km at a time. Often, it just times out if you try that. That’s why Google Maps is still installed on some devices.
I haven’t added anything actively. I think I might have enabled an option to send location data to improve the accuracy of the streets or something at some point, but I’m very unsure about that one.
I don’t have the most overpowered PC. I just have a small little desktop (Minisforum UM700) and Linux runs a whole lot better on it. My work also was giving out some old laptops that they were retiring (still better devices than my laptop which was a Lenovo T420) but they came without an operating system. I’ve always enjoyed using Linux but never made the full change because I would need MS Office and switching from Excel to LibreOffice Calc was just annoying. Since I didn’t need to do work on my personal PCs anymore, I made the switch and I love it. Games run better for me.
I currently use Linux Mint but I might switch to just plain Debian (or Linux Mint Debian Edition once they release LMDE6 which will be based off Debian Bookwork).
A friend loaned me a CD set of Mandrake which had an early version of KDE. I was floored away by something as simple as the level of customization you could do with the taskbar. And having this alien operating system running on an alien EXT3 partition format instead of FAT32 or NTFS that you didn’t need to defragment. It seemed pretty fantastical.
I loved tweaking the desktop environment on Windows by replacing explorer.exe with LiteStep and Blackbox so likewise I did this on Linux. Over time I had fun discovering Gnome2, Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. you name it. Eventually I got a desktop I really liked and felt productive on and as Windows XP approached end of life I had no intention of using Vista so I transitioned to exclusively Linux at that point.
I did play with different distros and running servers at the time, hosted VMs back in the day you had to take whatever distro they offered. But for my desktop I basically went Mandrake, Arch (didn’t know how to make everything work), Debian, Ubuntu, back to Arch.
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