The forecast is looking Qt1 for fans of open-source weather app Typhoon, the latest update to which swaps its creaking GTK3 backend for a lithe Qt 6 one.
What’s interesting about this change in Typhoon 1.7.x is that it doesn’t impact the UI in any noticeable way. The app still uses a colourful, borderless window with optional transparency, and conveys weather forecast data via stark white text and glyphs.
Archisman Panigrahi, Typhoon’s developer, says the Qt port was needed since GTK3 is being deprecated, but that rewriting the app in GTK4 was a non-starter given it ‘does not play well with simultaneously borderless and draggable windows’.
Would that matter? Well, it would. Most apps use traditional window frames and normal widget sets to render their UIs. Typhoon’s aesthetic is unorthodox by design. That’s its USP (it’s a revival of the iconic, if long-since abandoned GTK2 weather app Stormcloud).
While the Qt port doesn’t change the way Typhoon looks, it does change the way it behaves.
You can now resize the window from any side, no more aiming for an arrow in the lower right-hand corner. Fonts render more sharply thanks to the new Qt WebView, and touchscreen interaction is also improved.
If you prefer to set a custom background colour rather than rely on the ‘chameleonic’ style, which derives colours from current weather conditions (here in the UK that means it’s permanently blue), there’s a new colour picker for selecting a hue.
Fancy visual flourishes are also catered for. If you run Typhoon on KDE Plasma you can make use of background blur with transparency via KVantum or kwin-force-blur. On GNOME, transparency is still available, and you add background blur via the Blur My Shell extension.
Since not all distros may package Qt 6 in their repos (e.g., Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – old, but supported until 2030 via Ubuntu Pro), Typhoon’s Qt port is backwards compatible with Qt 5.
Finally,Typhoon is now available on Windows (as in, running on Windows natively, not via WSL – another benefit of Qt6 is the grade-A cross-platform support).
Panigrahi says ‘all features are supported in Windows’, including chameleonic colours and extreme weather notifications. I blew the cobwebs off my Windows 11 install to try it out and, sure enough, it looks and works as well as anything else.
It’s kind of fitting to see it running on Windows given that the design (originated in Stormcloud) has always looked rather Windows 8 Metro-esque.
Installing Typhoon on Ubuntu
Typhoon uses the Open-Meteo API for its weather data, OpenStreetMap for location search and uses ipapi for location detection based on your IP address (this only happens if you manually click the ‘Guess Location’ button in settings). No API keys or login details are needed to use this.
If you already use Typhoon from the official PPA, the new version is waiting in your software updates. If you don’t have the app, you can add the PPA on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and up, grab a DEB from GitHub (20.04 LTS), or use the Snap or Flatpak builds2.