Weather Apps on Linux Desktops

Not actually a question: Just a general comment.

In all my years of using Linux OSs, I have never found a weather app that knows anything about where I live.

Yeah they know all about the big cities, but they are Hundreds of KMs away from where I am, so the weather information is useless.

The best app I’ve found is an Android App I found on F-Droid, Pluvia, which recognises, and gives me up to date weather, obviously using locally sourced data, for the 3 small towns near where I live

Now given that Pluvia is Open Source, I guess I’m wondering why the Gnome developers of Gnome Weather, for example, can’t use the code or data the Pluvia devs are using.

looks like pluvia gets its data from OpenWeatherMap. searching the aur for openweather shows several programs you may find suitable.

2 Likes

I’ll give that a look see.

The only weather ‘app’ I can find is gnome-shell-extension-openweather.

I didn’t list this under KDE, because I was just making a general comment. But I don’t think I want any gnome shell extensions

Can you list any other examples.

Update:

I may have found one, I did a search for Open Weather Map apps for Linux, and found several options for Ubuntu. I’m checking out Meteo, now.

I tried Meteo, but two things, well one very major thing, It requires that I create an account with OpenWeatherMaps, I don’t recall doing that for Pluvia, in any case I have still not received the confirmation email from OpenWeatherMaps, so I guess I’ll have to log in to my Email Server to find it. Which means I’m less inclined to use Meteo.

On the other hand, I have discovered wttr.in GitHub - chubin/wttr.in: The right way to check the weather it can provide ASCII, HTML or Images that can be used in a variety of ways, as described on github.

I can write a wrapper for it, and do it my way.

After checking wttr’s data sources, Inotice that it use the BOM (the Australian National Weather Service), so I have much more faith in it’s reportage, as I currently use the BOM web site to check weather.

I note it’s written in python.

If you’re wanting something for KDE, have you tried the Weather Report widget?

Yes I did, it’s what started my semi rant.

It doesn’t know anything about the small towns around my way. In fact it can’t find Hervey Bay, which is a small city located on the Queensland coast, and which is a popular Tourist destination.

wttr.in, on the other hand, has no trouble locating them… because it uses the BOM data.

It must depend on the data source. Weather Report knows the small town I live in but it is using the BBC as it’s source.

Yes I believe that is the case.

It appears that most Weather Apps are using Northern Hemisphere centric Weather data as a consequence it is unusual for the smaller localities in Australia to be catered for.

It is only quite recently, That I have been able to find any Weather Apps that know about localities in Australia, other than the larger towns and Cities.

Pluvia, in fact is the first I’ve come across, and by happen stance I discovered wttr.in

Hi,
I have checked in my Firefox and I’ve found thoses that you can test:

Now I 've none weather appli but my prefered what meteo-qt. She was really good better than Cumulus but visualy it was the opposite. And the worse they are using the booth the same API , this one that you are using.
BTW if you have already use openweather one time if you have another application using it, the second will work out-of-box.

On my phone I use meteo of F-Droid repository.

Thanks @Cenwen yes I am aware of lots of Weather apps. My rant was about how, at least until recently, there were none that knew anything about small towns in Australia.

The problem has always been the data source. If the data source doesn’t know about the small towns near where I live, then it has no value, for me.

As I’ve already said wttr.in uses, among other data sources the Australian BOM, which means it does know about my part of the world.

meteo-qt is definitively out, ituses OpenWeatherMap
simple weather indicator is out (see above)
weather desk is out (see above), also aesthetic reasons
temps is out (see above)
cumulus is a possibility as it uses yahoo weather
wego is written by the same person as wrote wttr.in, but it uses OpenWeatherMap
gis-weather is out (see above)

Yes I know the OpenWeatherMap key is free, but the confirmation email has clearly triggered one of my anti spam filters, and I can’t be bothered finding out which one.

The BOM api doesn’t require I sign up, and it knows my locality.

It’s not difficult to write a python/qt wrapper for wttr.in, and basically it will be fun, and I can make it work the way I want.

Except, wttr.in is down all the time. I loved using it in Conky, but half the time their servers were down, and I got tired of it. Currently using plasma5-applets-weather-widget-2 on KDE. Yes it’s OpenWeather but it lists my city and I’m happy with it for now.

No worries, if I run into probs with wttr.in being down I can always write my own that uses BOM data.

Okay no worries.

It’s not difficult to write a python/qt wrapper for wttr.in, and basically it will be fun, and I can make it work the way I want.

I hope that she will so nice than temps or cumulus. And that you put the code on Github. good luck and works fine.

We will see. I may need help with Git hub though.

Well this is interesting.

I added a search entry to the currently functioning minimal app I have. i e=was originally screen scraping, but I realised there is a JSON data feed available, so I started using that.

OK so a few tests of the search function, and I realised I’m not getting results that i believe I should, after all it is still returning results for both the small town near here.

But not for much larger towns in Queensland. Towns like Charleville, Roma, Mt Isa, Hervey Bay, Toowoomba, Noosa.

Testing in the browser confirms my results.

This is truly sub optimal and also quite strange.

Weather forecasts seem indeed to depend on your location, probably related on number and network density of the meteorological stations providing input data. In sub-Saharan Africa I get a similar rough outlook only.

The thing is I get a very detailed weather report and forecast (using wttr.in) for my nearest little town, but nothing at all for much larger towns and Cities.

What’s got me Flummoxed is the fact that much bigger towns, like Toowoomba, don’t register, while the little town I’m near, in the back blocks of Queensland does.

Yeah we have an airstrip here, but Toowoomba has an airport, so does Hervey Bay, for example. But those two Cities don’t register.

And Toowoomba is closer to a met station than we are, unless you count the tiny country airstrip weather weather measurement service.

I’m starting pull my hair out.

Well how about that. If there is only one town or city with the name you are looking for, you need… no MUST enter only the town or city name plus the country name. If the city or Town name occurs once only in the world, you may enter only that … so Paris is a valid searh parm

It is only where there are multiple town in a country with the same name that you are required to enter the State, so my closest towns Must be entered as , Queensland, Australia, because there is a town with the same name in NSW, so Toowoomba is entered as Toowoomba, Australia… searching for Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia throws an error.

so the upshot is wattr.in is working as written.

Now here’s an interesting thing. We have an area in Queensland known as Mount Isa, a search in wttr.in using wttr.in/Mount%20Isa will find it, bit the actual area that is being reported on is the Town of ‘Mary Kathleen’, which is the actual town at that location.

What’s interesting here is that no one ever mentions ‘Mary Kathleen’, you never go to ‘Mary Kathleen’ you always go to Mount Isa.