Things are not looking very well for Ubuntu GNOME as a broken Maps App is about to bite the dust. In a recent announcement, the Ubuntu GNOME project maintainer Jeremy Bicha informs the community that because the popular GNOME Maps application from the GNOME stack has recently lost it’s free map tile service, the app will no longer be featured in future point releases of Ubuntu GNOME Xenial Xerus.
The issue was noticed around 12 July 2016 when the GNOME Maps app no longer becomes functional and according to Jeremy Bicha, the issues might take weeks or even months to resolve by the GNOME development team that is responsible for the maintenance of the app in finding a new free service for displaying maps.
Because of this, the Ubuntu GNOME developers are currently looking into the possibility of completely dropping GNOME Maps from the entire default installation medium beginning with the upcoming point release of the Ubuntu GNOME Xenial Xerus 16.04.1 LTS, a release which is expected to arrive on July 21, 2016.
“I spoke briefly with Tim Lunn (darkxst) and we’d like to remove gnome-maps from ubuntu-gnome desktop’s recommends for Xenial because we’d rather not ship Ubuntu GNOME 16.04.1 with an app that doesn’t work at all. We’ll need a fast-track SRU for this since there aren’t 7 days left before iso testing next week” stated Jeremy Bicha to the Ubuntu GNOME community.
This is by no means a really unwelcome event for both the GNOME development team as well las numerous GNU/Linux users who enjoy using the application.
It is possible that the app could be removed from other distributions as well if the team can’t find a solution to the problem soon.
Are you an avid GNOME Maps user and sad to see it go? Let us know in the comments.
