So, I’ve seem to have run into a new issue with Zorin, where none of the weather apps seem to want to function. When I try to input my location into Gnome Weather, it just crashes. There was another weather app that didn’t even load at all.
Truth is, I am already using Conky, I display a clock, as well as computer temperature readout. And I know you’ve seen this in my desktop screenshots before. I would prefer to add a weather Conky to my desktop, but I don’t see any listed as WEATHER in my Conky manager.
Due to widespread fires in my region, air quality has gone very bad, to very bad, to downright dangerious. Literally its so bad, that I have to run my bathroom exhaust fan now 24/7, as the smoke has been entering my home through the vent. And if I were to go outside without a mask, I would most certainly obtain lung cancer from extended exposure.
I want to monitor my weather specifics without having to need to go to my phones weather app, or to go to weather dot com. Is there a way that I can get this done? Remember, I am using XFCE desktop 4.12 on Zorin OS 12.4
The Problem with Conky is that the conky needs to communicate with a weather service. This used to work fine back in the day, but as its popularity spread, the weather service sites were getting so inundated with Weather requests that they could not function properly.
They ended the Conky Weather era by pulling those services offline and setting up new ones that must be paid by subscription.
I am not mad at them- they did what they had to do and they started out quite supportive of Linux Desktops tapping into their servers- until they got bogged into the ground.
I think Swarf mentioned a free service that is still available…
Yes, I saw that when I was doing a Google search, but the reason I dismissed that, is because it must connect to Yahoo services for the weather telemetry. And if you know anything about Yahoo, then you know they are the laughing stock of the internet for years now.
Yahoo has been hacked I don’t even know how many times. And not once did they put any real effort, into securing their services and servers with advanced firewalls. I don’t trust them, I don’t want them. The fact that they are still on the internet these days surprises me honestly.
Whats funny about all these weather websites, is that they will all allow you to download their apps for your mobile device, for free, and to use them, for free. They just put ads in the app, and I guess thats how they pay for their services. They could easily be doing the same thing with Linux OS, but they choose not to for some odd reason.
At the end of the day, Linux is just an OS, just like Windows, just like Android, just like IOS. They operate fine under Windows, Android, and MAC, but somehow choke to death on Linux. I think the reality is, they don’t believe they would make enough money off of us Linux users.
With such a low percentage, still to this day, of Linux users, is the reason many companies, including gaming companies, give for why they won’t code software for Linux. At the end of the day, its just a million excuses. What they should be saying, is that they code software for OS’s, that agree with their philosophy of screwing us over.
No, I wouldn’t want ads in my OS, but if it was just their app that had ads, I couldn’t care less. We surf the web everyday with ads that fill 1/4 of our screens on just about every web page. Now I do use an add blocker, but its designed to not block every single add, it lets some adds through, but stop the intrusive annoying ones.
Youtube is a perfect example, if I didn’t have an add blocker, I’d be dead from the stress. But thats because Youtube has been way over doing the adds for years now on video’s with monitization. I can understand an add at the beginning, and the ending of a video. But 20 adds in one video, sorry, not going to fly with me. lol
Since Google bought Youtube and took over, they have changed how it works. they often run more than one add at a time, then run adds in the middle. Now, the Youtuber you are watching Does not Get Paid for the ads if you skip them… Even if you skip the ad after it ran its course and is just in the last couple seconds.
No, there never was a solution. This is one of those Linux issues that have no solution I was talking about. There are many improvements that developers can make, that will allow Linux to be better, and better compete with Windows.
Its truly sad to see, that so many developers can do such a great job in certain areas, but completely drop the ball in others. Since my post here, we've had many other's come on the forum asking for very similar things.
Often times the reality of my life, I just have to give up trying. Cause if the developers don't see it as important to fix or bring improvement, nothing I say will make any difference at all. Its up to the dev's to make improvements to Linux, not the users who have 0 coding knowledge.
While technically both of you are right, its part of the Gnome Weather package. What I wanted originally, was the weather on my desktop directly like a widget, like Conky. But just as Aravisian said, Conky got its umbilical cord clipped from getting weather telemetry information, which renders it useless for that function.
So, as it is, I decided to just make Gnome Weather center package just be the go too, tool, in my OS, to provide that function. And as Storm said, it also provides this feedback under the date and clock section of panel.
So while not the perfect solution, good enough for me for now, so I marked this as solved to be done with it.
I got other more serious issues with Linux that need solved. Hopefully both of those get solved soon, both for Gnome, and for XFCE version of Zorin OS.
I've been on a desktop customization mood and started to look into Conky, and found this post so I decided to give it a try. I've used Open Weather Map API before but for some reason curl is not working with it, returning a 401 error constantly (even when it works when I use the same URL on the browser).
I managed to find a sloppy workaround to this using a Python script and writing to a temporary file, from which Conky can read the result. This actually helps to make fewer requests to avoid getting flagged by the API (and makes formatting a little easier).
The API has more information than what I'm using in the screenshot:
In any case if you are interested I will make this script a little nicer to use. It uses Python3 and the requests module which you have to install separately. But other than that the setup is not difficult at all.
