Weather is perpetually broken on KDE for at least the last 15 years. It is always a fight to know the outside temperature. Every few weeks or months the weather-widget-of-the-year needs to be replaced or tweaked or something.

This is really bothering me because lately I have had the kind of attitude that does not allow for "broken" things on my network. This MUST be fixed because I am just not going to ignore things because "open source". If it takes buying a brand new laptop with Windows whatever because it has a widget that can show the weather than so be it.

Why are there 15 different weather widgets on the KDE widget "store" but not a single one functions? I am not entering an API key, I am not looking up latitude/longitude coordinates, I am not installing extra software. Hey guys, the "U.K." is not the entire world. Is is a barely relevant part of the world and it makes no sense to only offer the weather to a few old chaps.

As for as taking up the reins and "doing it myself" that is exactly what I have been doing for the past few months and do not have time to fix somebody's My First Programming Project. Developers need to step up and take care of business on this. KDE as an organization gets enough funding money to pay somebody to maintain a weather widget.

Who is Wettercom and how can they stay in business when they do not provide current temperature, only highs and lows? What kind of organization would require highs and lows but not the current temperature? Why is KDE still using them after at least 10 years of the same no-current-temperature garbage weather reports? I do not see a use case for that.

Weather still works on Windows 8.1 with no updates from Microsoft. This is a 10 years old weather program that still works. It is also light years more featureful and better looking than any weather software KDE has ever offered in it's entire existence. KDE cannot field a weather widget that works for 10 days, heck 10 hours even.

I'm a poor guy who never runs full DE-s. I use my computer to run applications which do something useful, not to compute fancy environments. Conky does the job for me ... It is almost too fancy for my taste already. LOL

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yaWP, Yet Another Weather Plasmoid,

https://store.kde.org/p/999199

for kde4 was the best weather widget I've seen. Unfortunately, the developer (supposedly) will not update it for kde5. Can't say I blame him. kde5 is so ugly it makes windows-10 look good.

Apparently, Wettercom uses historical averages and doesn't have access to "up to date" weather information.
None of the others, if there are others, with the various weather widgets I've tried, other than yaWP, were anywhere near accurate.

Really like Emerson's Conky; it's beautiful. But you're dealing with a guy that doesn't want to input location info or bookmark a local weather forecast in a web browser. He's probably not up for configuring Conky. I've been using this one in kde lately:

https://store.kde.org/p/1683743

It works fine for me but you will have to input your location info as kde doesn't require that info by default apart from time zone and country. Can you imagine the outcry if the kde devs demanded your address during installation? Now I live in a major US city and I imagine weather information for major urban centers is easier to come by than for some rural community. Any weather widget will have to get its info from some free source like OpenWeather. The above widget uses that and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and free weather info may be more difficult to come by for smaller communities.

I like the browser to get my weather forecast . With duckduckgo up, just type city, state and weather and voila, plenty of weather sites to pick from ... Otherwise I just look out the window, or go outside . Why even a weather app in the first place? That said, I use KDE (KUbuntu) all the time. Didn't even know there was such a thing as a weather widget....

No, it isn't.
No, it isn't.
No, it doesn't.
There's only one thing which is broken on your network, and it's not KDE's weather app.
If that is your attitude, then Linux is probably not for you. Don't take it personally. Go and buy yourself a new laptop with Windows and be happy.

For outside temperature I have a sensor. Domoticz keeps database of outside temperature, no practical use, but I can tell temperatures up to 5 years back. This one is today.

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It could be also that the selected weather provider is unreliable. I personally had no issues at all with the bog-standard KDE weather widget and wetter.com for many years.

1 members found this post helpful.

Works for me. Grab a mountain bike, whistle up the dog and head out. The mutt will find any water/mud/slush that's around, so by the time you get home, it doesn't matter whether it's been raining or not ...

Deleted my original content. I agree with OP now. The KDE Weather widget sucks dick.

Maybe offtopic for you but do you have a smartphone? I find that's pretty darned reliable way of knowing what the current temperature is.

Alternate: You might find this helpful. For U.S. users, the NOAA web site has a text-only 7-day forecast that you can obtain for a given site. You, basically issue the command:
where "AAA" is the latitude of the site you want the forecast for and "BBB" is the longitude. Both are specified in degrees (to four decimal places); not degrees/minutes/seconds. In my case those are: lat=41.7456 and lon=-87.9811.

Putting that command in a crontab entry that runs every morning will get an updated 7-day forecast emailed to you. (I started doing this years ago to assist in planning the century training rides with my buddies.)

HTH...

Or you get get yourself a "weather rock" (first encountered at the flight ops office at WPAFB): If the rock is white, it's snowing. If it's wet, it raining. Etc. (OK... the humor may be limited to pilots who, as a class, obsess over the weather.)

I found the problem with the default weather plasmoid/widget. It is actually a system wide problem with KDE. This system has a problem with display updates coming through in the "wrong order". You can put the clock on seconds output and watch time run in "reverse" or just stop occasionally. This is not a problem with the system time though. It seems to be a problem with Kwin. I have now set vysnc to off in compositor settings in an attempt to remedy the situation. So I would still recommend the default weather plasmoid/widget to anyone that wants simple weather.

KDE weather plasmoids/widgets are indeed all quite ugly and unfeatureful though. The Bing powered animated radar on the Windows weather app is beautiful. Not a single plasmoid/widget has active radar output.

rkelsen you are probably right about Linux not being for me. I use FreeBSD on my main computer since practically the beginning of time. This very one I am posting from in fact. No problems with Kwin in BSD land as far as I know. Unfortunately the POS laptop in question has Linux on it. But go on feeling "elite", please. Like I said I have been fooling with Weather on KDE for the past 15 years. Were you even out of Kindergarten then? If it isn't this problem with weather on KDE it is another. Even though this was not the fault of the weather widget as many times as weather has failed on KDE for some reason I have a right to a grievance.

I ride a bike a lot so weather is important for me. For most people it is an after thought because they go right from one air conditioned area to another anyway. I need to see the weather "at a glance" and from across the room. No typing terminal commands or opening web browsers. So yes I am definitely not "up for" configuring anything.

I do have a smartphone but I do not do "apps" because it is a silent - or sometimes not so silent - protest against Android.

A "weather rock" would be more reliable than the forecast sometimes but I really just need the current temperature. I can see how stormy it is going to be just by how much light is filtering through the windows.

Speaking as someone who has been using KDE (on Linux) as my main desktop since version 1.1 in 1999, I must say that I have never seen the clock stop or run backwards!

Which Linux distribution are you using, and what version of KDE do you have installed? Are you using NTP?
You certainly have a right to an opinion. Ranting about it in such a manner on a public forum doesn't do anything to help. There are formal channels for bug reports. I'd suggest that you try one of those.
Over here, the government department for meteorology has a website which is constantly updated. Why would you choose to avoid such accurate and timely information, and place all of your faith into some dinky weather applet?

The weather here is somewhat less than stable, but that didn't ever stop me from riding a bicycle to work. You just have to accept that it is what it is and that sometimes you will be cold and/or wet. Commuting on a bicycle is a metaphor for life.
These words stand in stark contradiction to your claim of being a FreeBSD user.

@Jason_25 , you are not the only one who doesn't like the weather widgets in KDE which is one of a few reasons why I don't use KDE and use Xfce with compiz instead which has a pretty good weather widget that has up to 10 day forecasts as well.