The Mousam Weather App For Linux

When it comes to weather apps on Linux, there's actually a number of them out there. I've tried probably a couple of dozen different weather apps in the last 20 years on Linux, and I've got to say for the most part they've been underwhelming. But today I want to share with you a really cool weather app that I found the other day, and I thought it was pretty neat. I wanted to share it with you. This weather app is called Mousam. Taking a quick look at their website here, which is very well put together here. You got a screenshot of the application. You can see it's a very clean, slick-looking application. It's a GTK 4 application. It's also uses a lot of Python. Because of that, it's got a lot of Python libraries. So if you're installing this, I probably would install it as one of the containerized package formats because they do have it officially packaged as a flat pack or as a snap. For those of you on Ubuntu, you may want to go the snap route. They do also have an unofficial Debian package. But again, because of the extra Python libraries and just for ease of installation and uninstallation, >> [laughter] >> I'm I'm going to install it as a flat pack. I've actually already got it installed on this computer, but you can see it's free and open source software. This is actually hosted on GitHub if you want to go check out the source code. The license is GPL v3. So free and open source software. And looking at the languages, yeah, you can see it's primarily Python. So I've already got this installed. So let me go to a clean workspace here, and let me launch Mousam. I hope I pronounced that name right, too. It's kind of an odd name. I don't know if the app is named after the person that created it. I'm not exactly sure what Mousam is supposed to be, but here is what the app looks like out of the box, right? You get your location. By default, there won't be a location, a default location when you first launch the app. It will ask you to give it a location. It'll come up with a pop-up box like this, and you click the little plus, and you add a location. In my case, if I wanted to, I could actually add a second location. You can add multiple locations to this thing. So, if I, for example, lived in Chicago, um can I search by name and city? I probably have to uh uh also give it uh maybe a country. Maybe Chicago, USA. Uh if I had the zip code, I could probably enter that. I don't know what the zip code is. Let me ask Gemini, Chicago zip code. 60601. So, how about 60 601. There we go. Now we've got a second location. I can switch to that location to get what's going on in Chicago right now. Apparently, it's 75 and clear skies. And what's cool about this application, too, is it includes some It includes the information you want, which is, you know, well, temperature and precipitation, you know, chance of rain. But it also includes things like the pressure, the humidity, UV index. And here recently, because of all the wildfire smoke that's in the air, you may wonder about air quality, about air pollution. In this case, Chicago looks like 49. It's good. If I go uh back to my actual location here in Louisiana, uh we actually weren't doing very uh much better, right? 45, still good. But you know, uh some of you guys that are in the path of some of the smoke may see something different for air pollution. If I click on the little air quality index box, you can actually uh get how it breaks down uh the uh air pollution index here, right? What it's actually calculating that is in the air that is uh potentially unsafe. And for the most part, there's not much else going on uh on the screen other than what you see here. You do have a couple of tabs here. For example, on the weather here, you have your hourly breakdown. You could also click on wind to get the wind speed and direction, which is kind of neat information sometimes. And precipitation, um my umbrella status is resting. No precipitation in sight. And over here you've got tomorrow and then weekly if you want to take a look at like a multiple day forecast. Looks like it goes out about 7 days yeah for the week here. You can see it's going to get very very hot here where I'm [laughter] at. Well, it's going to get up to 102 103 next week. Yeah, I'm going to have a rough time here. And of course these temperatures are in Imperial format but by default it actually comes with Celsius. It comes with the metric system units. So that's the way it is out of the box. I had to switch it. Now when you switch this it will not change immediately. I had to close the app and restart the app before the change from metric to Imperial would take effect. So be aware of that. But other than that you have time format if you want to switch to 24-hour time. For me I'm fine with 12-hour time with AM and PM. Precipitation in inches which probably I need to turn that on cuz we get a lot of rain in Louisiana [laughter] and we typically are going to measure it in inches. I probably should turn that on. And other than that dynamic background if you're worried about the background changing based on the current weather conditions that's kind of a neat feature. It's turned on by default. I like it. I'll leave it turned on. And then advanced features a debugging mode. I haven't played around with any of that. One thing to note that if you want just you know the temperature for example you don't need all of this extra information about sunrise and sunset and air pollution. There is a compact view. If you click the the icon here for compact mode you get just this little small card with you know the the weather outlook the temperature and a little bit of other information date time wind speed humidity. For those of you that primarily use floating window managers desktop environments this compact mode could be useful. You just throw in a corner somewhere while you're working in a a application. For me, though, I probably mostly use the big mode and I would just open this whenever I feel like I actually need to check out the weather forecast. For me, I've never been a person that has used uh the standalone weather apps. This is probably the best weather app I've seen on Linux. Like I I think this is actually a genuinely good application. It looks good. It functions well. Uh the multiple locations works great. Being able to add as many locations as you want, switch between them, it all functions really well. My thing is for the most part, you know, rarely do I need the power of a big, bloated dedicated application cuz most of the time your desktop environments or your window managers are going to come with little weather widgets. Like here in Neeri, uh I'm using the Neeri uh tiling window manager uh and I'm using the Dank Material Shell. This weather widget is actually part of the Dank Material Shell. And it gives me a quick little weather outlook as well. I don't necessarily need, you know, that big application. So, I'm not sure if I'm going to keep Mousam installed on my system because I already have a weather app in my panel. But, if you were using a desktop environment or a panel or something that doesn't have a a nice weather widget, you may prefer that. Also, you guys in the the terminal, another thing, over the years, you know, if I really wanted weather information, I could curl uh wtr.in, you know, weather.india, whatever, right? And let me make this full screen. If you guys have never seen this, you can actually get some weather information from the terminal with the curl command by curling that particular web address. I mean, really, the sky is the limit when it comes to weather apps on Linux. But, I think for most people, most people probably uh would prefer a normal application and not getting their weather from the terminal. So, I think most of you guys probably are going to appreciate Mousam. Again, Mousam available as a flat pack, snap, or as a dev pack. For those on Arch Linux, and of course I'm using Arch in this case. This computer is using Cash OS, which is an Arch-based distribution. Mousam is available for installation from the AUR. I have not tried the AUR package, so I cannot vouch for it. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Matt, Steve, George, Darloff, Lee, Mark, Mythos, Erion, Peace Arch, Floor Reality, Les, Roland, War, Gentoo, and Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest-tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick episode about this Mousam weather app, it would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon, because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, want to see more videos about Linux and free and open-source software, like Mousam, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. These guys.