Marble
Version: 16.12.1 Web: https://marble.kde.org
We first featured Marble in HotPicks a long time ago [See p71, LXF160] as an ‘eye-candy’ application and we must admit that it has grown into something a lot more substantial. Marble is an open source replacement for Google Earth and a very useful desktop application, especially if you have an internet connection. Marble can show atlas, satellite or OpenStreetMap layers using stereographic, Mercator, gnomonic or azimuthal equidistant view—and these are just a small selection of all possible views and projections that are available.
Depending on what you want to do with this application, you can: explore distant places on planet Earth; go off world and explore moon craters or star constellations; and hop back to plan journeys by car or bike; watch historical world maps, e.g. from 1689; or track your position. Marble has a set of useful plug-ins, all enabled by default. Going to View > Online services, you can select extra layers, such as earthquakes, postal codes, weather, satellites, shared photos with geotags and a lot more.
Scrolling through the changelog of the major recent Marble update can make your fingers hurt; there are massive changes throughout the code. The team has recently refactored the routing algorithm, added bookmark support and fixed a lot of minor issues. There are other noteworthy changes, e.g. Marble now includes both a desktop widget and wallpaper, which display the time on top of a satellite view of the Earth in real time, day and night. Marble also has an Android version.
By default, Marble pulls out quite a KDE Frameworks dependencies, so if you use another desktop, you may want to get rid of that stuff. but you can build Marble from source using the $ cmake -DWITH_KF5=FALSE command.
“Watch the map of current earthquakes, postal codes, weather, satellites, shared photos with geo-tags and a lot more.”