KDE has available a very nice alternative to Google Earth for education. This allows the viewing of a globe of the Earth and measuring distances from one place to another. As well as viewing the Moon and all pertinent locations on it such as the Apollo landing sites. There is also the ability to view all satellites orbiting the Earth in real-time. As well as Earthquakes and Wikipedia articles about various locations. Adjusting the time interval in the settings allows the display of satellites to update faster. Below is a screenshot of this application running on Gnome. This is the default map view, but it also has a Google Earth-styled satellite map mode as well as a historic mode.
The Earthquakes mode allows a live display of all recent Earthquakes on a global map.
Hovering the mouse over each instance allows the viewing of information about each event, including the depth plus the date and time. And the depth below the crust the quake occurred. The Political map mode is a great way to show the various countries with good color contrast. Vector OSM is the best way to view all streets and major highways in a country. Very useful for planning a route for a long trip. It also allows a user to zoom right into the street level and view all cafes and other locations in a suburb. Clicking on a location will also pop up an infobox with the phone number and the location of the business as well as a web address if pertinent.
This program also allows a different map projection such as Mercator, which is great for learning about how maps work. Marble is a good way to see the world and learn about mapping and seeing what is happening in the world in terms of weather and temperature. And the OpenStreetMap mode has a great amount of detail when zoomed right in.
Install this program on Linux very easily.
╭──(jcartwrightlocalhost)────╮ ╰───────────────────────────╾╯(~)-(192.168.1.5)┋ su Password: [root@localhost jcartwright]# dnf in marble Last metadata expiration check: 1:41:35 ago on Thu Jul 13 08:02:59 2023. Dependencies resolved. |
This will pull down a lot of KDE dependencies, but this is worth it to use the best KDE desktop globe on the market.