What are you trying to do with it?

.pbf is a compression format (a bit like a .zip-file) which contains the .osm-file. The .osm-file is nothing more then an XML-file with a specific format and a .osm-extension.

Those are not meant for day-to-day users but more for developers.There are some programs able to open those files, such as JOSM or Osmosis.

@Irelephant at least .osm files can be loaded in #JOSM, but if your extract is big enough (say, a city or bigger), it might clog it, since it will try to render _everything_. It's mostly aimed at loading changesets, not whole areas.

After that, it seems like you can convert the pbf into a SQLite/Spatialite DB and load it in #QGis, but you're already transforming the data.

EDIT: yay! Federation works! (Answered from Mastodon :)

I asked ChatGPT and there seems to be two options to view OSM extracts:

1. QGIS can open .osm and .pbf

2. JOSM can open .osm

I did not verify or test this by myself. Maybe some people have more experience?