How to do stuff in Maps for gnome?

Hardware Librem 5
1

I tried using Maps on the L5 for finding directions today. And I ran into some dificulties.

First of all, the GPS had a hard time finding my whereabouts, and once found it wasn’t always that accurate. At first the location reverted to a point near my home address, then it switched back and forth between that location and a point somewhere near (but not at) my actual location.

Will the accuracy and the responsivenes of the GPS improve in the future, or is this it?

What I really would like learn from anybody out there, is how Maps works.

For example: after you get your directions, how do you make it go? Or, alternatively, how do you quit them and go back to the regular map interface?
There appear to be buttons for neither, and the keyboard is of no use.

Your help would be highly appreciated. :+1:

2 Likes
2

Switched to Pure Maps. Not perfect either (not suited for dark mode, for instance), but the interface works a lot better (on the L5).
(If only the GPS…)

3

I haven’t used Maps all that much, but when I was a passenger in the car running Maps, my location seemed accurate enough, although when going through roads shielded from the satellites, the accuracy declined. Getting back onto open roads, the accuracy increased back to a more accurate track.

Maps, unfortunately, does not side-scroll the map to keep your location centered on the screen, so you have to manually scroll the screen. Adding an autoscrolling feature would be very helpful. It would be nice to also change the direction that your positional icon on the screen moves. I believe mine was moving horizontally right to left across the screen. Should be user selectable, where you could choose vertical movement instead of horizontal movement.

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At first glance, Pure Maps is a lot slicker. It has a follow-me mode. Will test that tomorrow. On my bike. Gnome maps is way too cluncky to use on a bicycle. Hope Pure Maps does a better job.

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My current location (i.e. the little blue circle pointer icon on the map) jumps wildly from near where I actually am, to Los Angles, CA, then around the world to China at 22.97137, 113.88068. I tried the Librem 5 outside and inside but still it doesn’t work any better.

Once it lands on China it tends to stay there (mostly). (I would tell you where in China, but I can’t read their language.)

Closing maps and restarting it, the blue circle lands in LA, Calif (USA). Then jumps to where I actually am here in Eastern California. Then jumps to China and stays there for awhile, then jumps back to where I am again, then back to China where it gets stuck most of the time.

I installed the gnome-maps package on my Debian box and it first lands near Edward’s Air force base in California, (strange; but I think this might be the hub of the internet company that serves me), then finds roughly where I am and stays there (unlike my Librem 5 phone which then jumps to China).

So both of these instances of Gnome Maps are using the same WiFi at a minimum. But my laptop doesn’t have a cell signal, nor GPS. Not sure what might be making this location go so crazy.

Gnome maps says they use geoclue for one’s location. So I’m looking at that right now.

I also tried switching cellular traffic on the Librem 5 off (manually with the switch) but location still jumps to China. Also rebooted the phone then tried again but no better.

lol, sort of like “Librem 5 – ET Phone Home!”

Oh, i’m sure there is a better reason for this chaos. (Just got my Librem 5 yesterday after a multi-year wait for it. … overall it looks better than expected.)

I’ve also installed the geoclue-2-demo package and run it and it seems to be the trouble.

1 Like
6

I will not have too much improvement for that wimdows. Try to find your way in an offline world and with maps. Sure to be on the track of an algorithm show you the shortest way will be nice. But you can do that too with simple Waypoints.

So yes if you are in unknown waters, you will like to know your location in milliseconds to fell more secure. However modern Megacorps throw a a lot of energy on that to get precise information about movement and location. So its hard to reach that, without leaking information about your position and movement.

However, and i am not sure how geoclue works. You can collect Wlan on your Route and store that information to, its however energy intensive at the first collection. Big Corps too share location from folks with phones just in time BLE-pings (Bluetooth Low Energy) from cooperation devices and known IoT Devices. Some Provider known and share information by Home-WLAN-Routers and som Car-Builders by Cars…

Its hard to over ruff that state of development but possible.

Did you know about the Secure User Plane Location Protocol?

ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS#SUPL

I think purism and some Linux Community can build a free alternative, i am just not sure about how free they will be - if some finance the open source development.

Better i think enough folks will have an interest to build a spam and spybot free internet, by knowledge about that issues and we will see and have one ore more alternatives in future. However it will have some time.

7

My L5 also located me in China when first activated (once), but it corrected that error pretty quickly. After that it jumped between my actual location and another position somewhere else in the Netherlands every time I activated the GPS.
Lately it has settled on my actual location much quicker, making the whole thing a lot more useable. The team over at Purism must have been making significant improvements to the software.
By the way: you might give PureMaps a try. It doesn’t cope well with dark themes (because it uses blue texts), but it is a lot nicer to use than Maps for Gnome.

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Mine originally located me at about 35 meters from my house, and continues to do so. But I haven’t taken my L5 for a stroll lately, so I don’t know if it will eventually pinpoint me. I might have a look at adjusting the gps settings, as others have done.