Set Geolocation of system manually in System Settings

Brainstorm
1

For my Laptop, Tablet and Smartphone the location service can properly identify my location based on my network. However, when using my Desktop PC, it does not work properly.

Now for a Desktop PC in my case I only move it when I move my complete home (so once every few years at most) so it would be practical, to have a setting to specify the location once, so that apps like a weather or maps app, can still use the location API, but that it is set to one specific location. Then this would always be correct and no need to use any network based location estimation, which in my case doesn’t work. Even if it would work, setting it locally would allow to avoid the leakage of user specific data to the location service.

I do not have an overview of whether this only requires a setting or additional software, but I thought I’ll drop the idea here :slight_smile:

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This is discussed here : debian - Linux: manually set geographic position - Super User
(I haven’t tested it).

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Not a bad idea.

Even on a device that could report the location itself it might be nice to be able to report a different one.

Whether this is doable (with various degrees of difficulty) will mostly depend on how many different system could be used for this.

I think the most widely used one is geoclue.

According to its man page it can be configured to have a “static source”.

If course the respective file is usually not writable by a user so a bit difficult to modify by system settings.

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