OUR EXPERT
Nick Peers prides himself on his sense of direction but is not to be trusted when he announces he’s found a shortcut. Expect to double your journey time.
Yhink maps, and the obvious solution is to flip out your phone or web browser and head to T Google Maps. But that doesn’t sit well with our open source ethos, which is why we’re fans of OpenStreetMap (see feature LXF276). And what better way to interact with OpenStreetMap – and a host of other maps – than through your desktop with KDE Marble (https://marble.kde.org)?
Marble offers far more than just a simple way to view maps. Think of it more as a desktop globe with built-in extras, including optional encyclopaedia and weather reports, all powered by friendly engines from OpenStreetMap to Wikipedia. In fact, Marble can go beyond the confines of Earth to cover other planets and even dip into your imagination. It’s even capable of plotting routes from A to B (even Olympus Mons? – Ed), although this is perhaps its weakest part.
Finding your way to Marble
You’ll find Marble in all major distro package managers – sudo apt update && sudo apt install marble installs the version bundled with your Linux distro with the minimum of fuss. You can get the latest version through Snap ( sudo snap install marble ) or Flatpak (visit https://flathub.org/apps/org.kde.marble), but there’s very little difference between them, and in our experience only the Flatpak version worked correctly. For the purposes of this tutorial, though, we’re focusing on version 2.2.20, which ships with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
When you launch you’ll see the default map offers a variety of views of the planet, with a classic topographical
