Being a Linux nerd I rarely go outside —that’s a joke— but knowing what the weather is doing beyond my basement walls —still a joke— is useful – if only because it usually gives me an excuse to stay at my desk compiling my own kernel —not a joke.
Scores of Linux weather apps, widgets, and add-ons exist. These put current temperature, conditions, and (usually) near-term forecasts within easy reach, or permanently on show.
And honestly? That’s all the weather data most of us care to know. It answers ‘will I need a jacket?’, ‘will it rain today?’, ‘can I get my biceps out to impress people —scratch that, I’ll do it anyway cos I’m an annoying gym bro’.
However, there are times people need/want to know more than just temperature and conditions.
For example, growing up near the British coast meant a lot of my mates surfed so they’d keep an eye on general wind speed and direction as it affected waves.
But a lot of basic weather apps and add-ons tend to punt you to a web browser to get that info. No great issue, but auto-play videos, newsletter requests, notification prompts, premium upsells, and other distractions often cloud (heh) the view once you’re there.
Not so with Mousam, a GTK4/libadwaita weather app for Linux desktops created by Amit Chaudhary.1
Ultimate Weather Dashboard for Linux
Mousam doesn’t shirk at serving up a comprehensive dashboard of weather stats – for any location you wish to add, and the ability to save and switch between different locations at any time.
While the app does put a lot of information on show the ‘bento box’ layout, graphs, bars, and other visual cues make the data scannable, parsable, and easy to understand.
Mousam features at-a-glance:
- Current conditions, temperature, and ‘feels like’
- By-hour forecast for current day with max temperatures
- Tomorrow and week-ahead forecasts
- Precipitation
- Wind speed and direction
- Sunrise and sunset times
- UV index
- Air quality
- Humidity and dewpoint
- Air pressure
When it comes to configuration:
- In-app location search
- Add/switch between multiple locations
- Manual refresh button
- Choice of metric or imperial units
- Background colour based on current weather (can be disabled)
Most of us don’t need that much information about the weather which means Mousam isn’t going to be an app that everyone needs.
And amongst the weather-obsessed, there may some specific they want which isn’t (yet) shown – though some of that may be not be provided by the backend weather service Mousam uses, which is Open Meteo.
I’d love to moon phase info shown, and perhaps a ‘next rain due’ box added (a feature I’ve only ever seen in the Apple weather app – living in the UK that info is very handy). Design wise, being able to use the app at narrower widths would be welcome.
And first-run could benefit from an onboarding/welcome screen; and were I designed this app I’d consider moving the list of saved locations to a toggle-able sidebar instead (perhaps with each entry using a card to showing current conditions.
Those nit-picks aside, Mousam is an app I find myself super impressed with.
Passive weather tools which sit on the desktop panel (or the weather widget in Firefox’s new tab page) are arguably more useful since you don’t need to actively open anything to see the weather as it’s staring at you much of the time), but there’s definitely a place for a richer offering.
Which is where Mousam slots in – a well-designed, fleshed out Linux weather app more than a match for meteorological apps made by Apple and Microsoft.
How to Install Mousam Weather App
Head to the Mousam homepage to learn a lick more info about the app. Source code is available on GitHub, where is where you’ll want to head to report issues, file feature requests, or contribute to its development
You can install Mousam on Ubuntu from the Snap Store (official package), or if you prefer Flatpak you can find it on Flathub (also an official package).
Prefer DEBs? An unofficial PPA has Mousam packages for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 24.10 linked to from the Mousam website. I found the DEB build buggy, but after some digging found that manually installing the python3-gi-cairo package sorted it.
Let me know what you think down in the comments!
- If you like this app, buy him a coffee to say thanks ↩︎