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 Moosam. 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 GTK4 application and this 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 Flatpak 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 just for ease of installation and uninstallation. I'm going to install it as a Flatpak. I've actually already got it installed on this computer, but you can see it's a free and open source software. This is actually hosted on GitHub if you want to go check out the source code. The license is GPLv3, so free and open source software. And looking at the languages, you can see it's primarily Python. I've already got this installed, so let me go to a clean workspace here and let me launch Moosam. 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 Moosam is supposed to be, but here is what the app looks like out of the box. 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. If I, for example, lived in Chicago, can I search by name and city? I'd probably have to also give it maybe a country, maybe Chicago, USA. 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. How about 60601. 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. What's cool about this application too is it includes the information you want, which is temperature and precipitation, chance of rain, but it also includes things like the pressure, the humidity, UV index. 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 back to my actual location here in Louisiana, we actually weren't doing very much better. 45, still good. 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 get how it breaks down the air pollution index here, what it's actually calculating that is in the air that is potentially unsafe. For the most part, there's not much else going on 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. Precipitation, my umbrella status is resting, no precipitation in sight. Over here, you've got tomorrow and then weekly. If you want to take a look at a multiple day forecast, looks like it goes out about seven days for the week here. You can see it's going to get very, very hot here where I'm at. It's going to get up to 102, 103 next week. I'm going to have a rough time here. Of course, these temperatures are in imperial format, but by default, it actually comes with Celsius. It comes with the metric system units. 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. Be aware of that. 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 because we get a lot of rain in Louisiana. We typically are going to measure it in inches. I probably should turn that on. Other than that, dynamic background, if you're worried about the background changing based on the current weather conditions, that's a neat feature. It's turned on by default. I like it. I'll leave it turned on. Then advanced features, a debugging mode. I haven't played around with any of that. One thing to note that if you want just 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 icon here for compact mode, you get just this little small card with 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 different 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 these standalone weather apps. This is probably the best weather app I've seen on Linux. I think this is actually a genuinely good application. It looks good. It functions well. The multiple locations works great. Being able to add as many locations as you want, switch between them, all functions really well. My thing is, for the most part, rarely do I need the power of a big, loaded, dedicated application because most of the time your desktop environments or your window managers are going to come with little weather widgets. Like here in Neary, I'm using the Neary tiling window manager and I'm using the dank material shell. This weather widget is actually part of the dank material shell. It gives me a quick little weather outlook as well. I don't need that big application. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep Moosam installed on my system because I already have a weather app in my panel. If you are using a desktop environment or a panel or something that doesn't have a nice weather widget, you may prefer that. Also, you guys in the terminal, another thing over the years, if I really wanted some weather information, I could wttr.in, weather.india, whatever. 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. Really, the sky is the limit when it comes to weather apps on Linux. I think for most people, most people probably would prefer a normal application and not getting their weather from the terminal. I think most of you guys probably are going to appreciate Moosam. Again, Moosam available as a Flatpak, Snap, or as a DevPak. For those on Arch Linux, of course, I'm using Arch. In this case, this computer is using CacheOS, which is an Arch-based distribution. Moosam 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, Darlof, Lee, Mark, Methos, Erjan, Roland, Wargentu, Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. This quick episode about this Moosam weather app 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 and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open-source software like Moosam, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.