Over the years, weather applications for Linux have come and gone. Finding a good one is a pain in the butt. I’ve generally used the same application, inasmuch as possible, for quite some time.

The name of the application is My Weather Indicator and it can be found here. 

It allows you to have a couple of locations, provides forecasts, updates as frequently as every 15 minutes, is really minimal, has notifications that you can actually disable, sticks to the system theme just fine, and even has automatic location discovery based on your public IP address.

Most importantly, it works and stays out of your way unless you want to use it. You can look in your system notification and see the temperature and conditions at a glance. You can click on either of the locations, or just the single location if you prefer, and know what to expect.

It’s also trivial to install, especially if you’re using a system that supports PPAs.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt update
sudo apt install my-weather-indicator

Then, you can start it from your application menu, set the preferences to start at boot, and not have to worry about that again. From there, just go ahead and configure your location(s) and other settings, offering both imperial and metric measurements and the ability to blend them, as well as even a variety of icons.

It’s small, it’s simple, it does one thing – and it does it well. It tells you the weather.

I wanted to test it out to see how well it works. With just one tab open, there are 13 instances of ‘msedge’ tasks running. It’s consuming quite a bit of CPU for being so idle. It also lags a bit visually. It’s almost imperceptible, but it’s there. Opening menus has a small lag, for example. As does typing this text – though it’s not using an insane amount of CPU cycles.

It’s definitely a dev build, and I’d expect the final product to be more polished. I am unable to login to the browser, so I can’t share settings and a profile across multiple instances. That doesn’t yet work, but it does give you a helpful message that lets you know that it’s not yet supported.

I do not see me using this as my daily driver, nor even one of my many browser instances that I have configured for different tasks, but here we are. It has a nice dark mode available by default. I haven’t tried to install any extensions or anything. It’s an intuitive browser to use, as would be expected as a Microsoft product.

It was trivial to install. They provide a .deb or an .rpm. So, you shouldn’t need to work hard to install it on quite a variety of distros. You can find it packaged here. This is, interesting, the first MS product I’ve used in a very long time. I don’t even us VS Code, though I probably should give that a try.

I suppose that I’d keep running it, if I actually cared. After all, my running it would report my uses back to the mothership and they’d theoretically improve the browser because of it. Alas, I really don’t care. It’s great to see MS releasing opensource software. It’s great to have another browser alternative. I just don’t care enough to do anything about it.