<story><title>Opendesktop.org – Libre Cloud Services</title><url>https://www.opendesktop.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lio</author><text>My own very minor gripe is with the maps component.&lt;p&gt;Because it uses OpenStreetMap as a map source it doesn&amp;#x27;t show any settlements larger 250,000 for my area because those settlements call themselves &amp;quot;towns&amp;quot; and not &amp;quot;cities&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;When you zoom out all you see is a blank space with no labels for quite a large area of the screen.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile very small settlements (&amp;lt; 20K people) &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; shown at max zoom just because they happen to have the right kind of church building, which in the UK means they can call themselves &amp;quot;cities&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve raised this issue with OpenStreetMaps support for many years and they just either say it&amp;#x27;s something to be fixed by client libraries or it&amp;#x27;s not important.&lt;p&gt;They could be right I guess.  However, Goople maps, Apple maps and Microsoft maps handle this correctly and that&amp;#x27;s what OpenDesktop explicitly say they are trying to replace here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Rygian</author><text>There is an ongoing proposal discussed on Reddit [0] for an alternate rendering that fills in &amp;quot;empty areas&amp;quot; with a different algorithm. The comparison is really nice [1].&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;openstreetmap&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;pc9fof&amp;#x2F;openstreetmap_places_rendering_that_fills_in&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;openstreetmap&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;pc9fof&amp;#x2F;opens...&lt;/a&gt;
[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tiles.musa.kodapan.se&amp;#x2F;compare.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tiles.musa.kodapan.se&amp;#x2F;compare.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Opendesktop.org – Libre Cloud Services</title><url>https://www.opendesktop.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lio</author><text>My own very minor gripe is with the maps component.&lt;p&gt;Because it uses OpenStreetMap as a map source it doesn&amp;#x27;t show any settlements larger 250,000 for my area because those settlements call themselves &amp;quot;towns&amp;quot; and not &amp;quot;cities&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;When you zoom out all you see is a blank space with no labels for quite a large area of the screen.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile very small settlements (&amp;lt; 20K people) &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; shown at max zoom just because they happen to have the right kind of church building, which in the UK means they can call themselves &amp;quot;cities&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve raised this issue with OpenStreetMaps support for many years and they just either say it&amp;#x27;s something to be fixed by client libraries or it&amp;#x27;s not important.&lt;p&gt;They could be right I guess.  However, Goople maps, Apple maps and Microsoft maps handle this correctly and that&amp;#x27;s what OpenDesktop explicitly say they are trying to replace here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NGRhodes</author><text>FYI, in the UK, historically city status was given to towns with cathedrals, but since the 20th century city status is awarded by the monarch.
England has 3 large towns with over 200000 population -Luton, Northampton and Reading and about 30 towns with between 100000 and 200000 population.</text></comment>