MLS and It's Alternative
On March 13, 2024, Mozilla decided to retire their geolocation service and database.1
This is probably the reason you are currently reading this post and I can also safely assume that your system is not able to locate itself anymore. No worries though, there's a quick fix.
It's BeaconDB! An open-source alternative to the Mozilla Location Service. It's still in an experimental stage, but already pretty mature. And to our luck, also uses the same request format as Mozilla.2
The Fix, at least with GNOME via Geoclue
On most Linux distributions, location services are provided by a service called Geoclue. Though by default, current and older versions of Geoclue are configured to use MLS as their geolocation database.
That's a problem when MLS doesn't work. And that is the case forever now. Fortunately, switching over to BeaconDB is easy.
First, find geoclue.conf. It's location differs on different distributions with different package manages. On Fedora, you can find it at /etc/geoclue/geoclue.conf.
Once found, edit the file as root.
[wifi]
enabled=true
url=https://beacondb.net/v1/geolocate
To apply the configuration change, restart the Geoclue service. On systems using SystemD, do this (and be root):
systemctl restart geoclue.service
That's it. Open an app that's using location services and try out your system's regained capabilities!
Troubleshooting
If your system indefinitely tries to locate itself without any success or even fails, your area might not be indexed.3
Have a look at the BeaconDB website to find out which contribution options might be viable to you. Have fun!