Geoclue2 doing weird things today?

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1

This morning I booted my laptop and GNOME notified me that my timezone had changed.

Then, in my work’s team chat, somebody else (who shares pretty similar NixOS configurations), told me the same.

In the case of both of us, the timezone selected jumped 1 to the west:

  • One went from to Lisbon to Madeira.
  • Other one went from Madrid to Canarias.

Of course, none of us did wake up in an island. :laughing:

I find suspicious that this happened to both of us at the sime time, while we are one thousand kms away. Is this something related to some global failure of BeaconDB or GeoClue services?

FWIW, my nix-info:

  • system: "x86_64-linux"
  • host os: Linux 6.15.8-zen1, NixOS, 25.05 (Warbler), 25.05.20251021.481cf55
  • multi-user?: yes
  • sandbox: yes
  • version: nix-env (Nix) 2.28.5
  • nixpkgs: /nix/store/58hq018zklzi0jyjfks7g4q02bckvp7j-source
2

Sounds like messed up DST configuration.

And I don’t know whether Gnome respects the systems TZ settings or does it’s own thing on top. But my experience with gnome and plasma is, that they take system configuration as a suggestion and do whatever they want anyway.

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3

Gnome seems to get messed up when connected to a VPN, I don’t have a GPS modem, so geoclue gives me first the location of the VPN and then my actual location:

/nix/store/8iwslwc9ly86dmax2j3bv2kdn20z8nzb-geoclue-2.7.2/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/where-am-i   
Client object: /org/freedesktop/GeoClue2/Client/5

New location:
Latitude:    38,741300°
Longitude:   -9,161330°
Accuracy:    25000,000000 meters
Description: ipf fallback (from WiFi data)
Timestamp:   dom 02 nov 2025 21:22:17 (1762114937 seconds since the Epoch)

New location:
Latitude:    44,493800°
Longitude:   11,338700°
Accuracy:    25000,000000 meters
Speed:       362940,606881 meters/second
Heading:     74,325384°
Description: ipf fallback (from WiFi data)
Timestamp:   dom 02 nov 2025 21:22:22 (1762114942 seconds since the Epoch)

I actually am using VPNs for Madrid and Lisbon, and can confirm that even tho the coordinates that geoclue gives are for Madrid and Lisbon, in the gnome interface I’m getting Madeira and Canarias

4

I don’t use VPN, but the test you made at least demonstrates I’m not crazy :laughing:

Nothing relevant changed in system configuration, but indeed on Oct 26th, DST changed. I never had experienced this before.

I did this workaround:

timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Lisbon

Now it shows this:

timedatectl status    
               Local time: lun 2025-11-03 15:07:32 WET
           Universal time: lun 2025-11-03 15:07:32 UTC
                 RTC time: lun 2025-11-03 15:07:32
                Time zone: Europe/Lisbon (WET, +0000)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

timedatectl show
Timezone=Europe/Lisbon
LocalRTC=no
CanNTP=yes
NTP=yes
NTPSynchronized=yes
TimeUSec=Mon 2025-11-03 15:08:35 WET
RTCTimeUSec=Mon 2025-11-03 15:08:35 WET

I don’t know if the fix will be permanent :thinking:

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