Why is GNOME Weather being included with broken locations?

Ask Fedora
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1

For over a year, GNOME Weather has been unable to set locations outside of major cities. I know years ago selecting less-major cities was no problem, and today it can still work with someone else’s script.

I don’t know what GNOME is doing about the development of that, but I’m now curious as to why Fedora is including it by-default with GNOME? Weather out-the-box leaves a persistent notification to select a location regardless if it’s ever opened, and it’s basically a broken app without being able to select a reasonable location (I don’t want the Weather from a town over an hour away).

I don’t believe it should be included by-default.

Alternatively, what’s the best way to remove or disable it? I feel like removing and package locking it is a bit much, but maybe there’s a gsettings to disable the notification for it?

2

I think it works with Calendar. I can’t comment on either, I remove both.

3

Basically nobody is interested in fixing this still today.

Which now has me raise the question to distros shipping it. Why is Fedora shipping GNOME Weather still, and what would it take for a proposal to stop it on the grounds of the app being shipped broken?

A weather app where you can’t see the weather for your location is arguably useless, and in Fedora’s case it leaves a permanent notification shade to select the Weather location.

4

You can remove it from Notification using the GNOME Extension “Just Perfection” and replace it with the “OpenWeather”.
Additionally, it is possible to add other cities via merge requests: GWeather – 4.0: Adding new locations.

1 Like
5

While I am sympathetic with your issue, I can understand GNOME’s decision too. They have dropped an old technology in favor a a newer one, in line with the rest of the system, and while the new Weather app misses functionalities available in the old version, it is not something that breaks the system or makes it less usable for the majority of users.

So while GNOME’s decision to consciously introduce a feature regression in the Weather app with the port to GTK4 might be questionable, IMO is the right choice. The system remains more consistent, and the time will come when the issue will be fixed. I understand your loss of patience though.

Truth be told, they didn’t do the same with the Calendar reminders. They have kept the old evolution-alarm-notify module for reminder notifications. I would have preferred a feature regression here as well, with just a notification sent in the Notification Center, with no possibility of snoozing etc, rather than have the feature available in an outdated (and rather ugly) interface.

So everyone’s use case is somewhat different. We’ll have to find alternatives where the system doesn’t work in line with our needs.