Marble aims to be a lightweight fast educational geographical browser that easily runs on any plattform that is supported by Qt™. While higher resolution maps would be nice to have they aren't necessary for every user and every use case (just like you don't use a full blown text processor each time you just need a simple editor). Also notice Marble is free software and is based on data that can be freely redistributed in the same way that applies to Free Software.

Despite depicting the earth as a globe Marble doesn't make use of any 3D hardware acceleration. This has the advantage of running at a decent speed on any plattform and hardware supported by Qt™. However it has the disadvantage that it doesn't run as smoothly as it could if it used hardware accelerated OpenGL. Marble just uses plain 2D graphics and therefore requires a graphics adapter that is fast at drawing 2D graphics. We plan to add an optional OpenGL backend in the future.

No, never. But the authors always welcome feedback. Marble is licensed under the LGPL, so you will never have to pay for this program.

Marble is not only an application but also a Free Software project. As such it's easy to join: just contact us via the kde-edu mailing list (kde-edu@kde.org).