Qgis December 2025 News [patched]
QGIS 3.36 represents a significant milestone in the QGIS development roadmap, offering a wide range of improvements, new features, and bug fixes. Users can expect a more efficient, powerful, and user-friendly experience when working with geospatial data.
Stay tuned for more updates and news from the QGIS project in the coming months! qgis december 2025 news
The most significant news item of December 2025 is not a feature, but a closure. After years of parallel maintenance, the QGIS project has officially merged its long-term-release (LTR) branch with its core development trunk under a new “Continuous Stability” model. For nearly a decade, the fear of a “hard fork” haunted the open-source GIS community—whispers that commercial interests or governance fatigue might splinter the user base. The December announcement, signed by the Project Steering Committee and supported by a new, EU-backed sustainability grant, declares that the fork never came. Instead, QGIS has adopted a modular plugin-versioning system that allows enterprise users to pin API behaviors while still receiving security patches. In essence, QGIS has learned to be both a river and a glacier: moving quickly at its headwaters, yet solidly frozen for those who need stillness. This is not just engineering; it is political ecology, a negotiation between the speed of innovation and the inertia of institutional trust. QGIS 3
In the sprawling ecosystem of geospatial technology, December is rarely a month of thunderous launches. It is a season of consolidation, of wrapping loose threads into a bow before the year’s end. Yet, the news emerging from the QGIS project in December 2025 feels different. It is not marked by a single, flashy feature—no AI “magic button” or blockchain-integrated ledger. Instead, the headlines whisper of a more profound maturation: the official deprecation of Python 2 legacy hooks, the seamless fusion of cloud-native COGs (Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs) with offline-first editing, and the quiet rise of QGIS as the de facto interpreter for the European Union’s new open geospatial mandate. To the outside world, these are footnotes. To the practitioner, they are tectonic. The most significant news item of December 2025
The QGIS 3.40 LTR (Long-Term Release) has had its maintenance period extended through May 2026, offering extended support for enterprise users. Infrastructure and Documentation Updates
No deep essay on QGIS news would be complete without addressing the subtle rift exposed in the December changelog. The new “Geo-Assist” module—a lightweight, locally run LLM fine-tuned on GDAL documentation and StackExchange threads—has sparked a quiet war of words. Traditionalists celebrate that a novice can now type, “find all sliver polygons caused by the 2024 administrative boundary update” and receive a complete model builder workflow. Radical cartographers, however, raise a darker point: when the machine writes the script, who owns the error? The December news cycle featured a blistering blog post from a veteran Norwegian hydrographer titled “You Are Not Thinking, You Are Just Prompting.” The QGIS team’s response—a mandatory “explainability” popup that visualizes the logical steps of any AI-generated geoprocessing—is a masterclass in open-source governance. It admits that automation is inevitable, but refuses to let it become opaque.
While 4.0 is the future, the QGIS 3.44 'Solothurn' remains the current "Latest Release" and the final feature release of the 3.x series.