Comment by gerdesj

12 hours ago

"Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM"

What a wonderful world we have created where the fix for a 1GB RAM guzzler reduces it to a mere 130MB.

Now I could start off with my old ZX80 or even my C64 (which is doing fine, thanks, and sports a USB "drive" next to its Quickshot II) but I think my first 80486 is a realistic comparison.

That ran at 25MHz, had a maths co-pro in it had 4MB RAM, a 20MB IDE HDD and I think the Orchid graphics card had 0.5MB RAM. The monitor was of course a 14" CRT VGA. OK so late 1980s!

However, that thing could run Win 3.1 and Word 2 and I think I managed to wedge a dodgy copy of Quark Express on it. I could play F117 and other games on it.

Oh well, lets see what this Linux box has on it:

/usr/bin/inxi - 1.4MB

    $ inxi -w Yeovil,UK
    Weather:
      Report: temperature: 16.05 C (61 F) conditions: scattered clouds
      Locale: Yeovil, UK current time: Mon 10 Aug 2026 01:16:05 BST
        Source: OpenWeatherMap.org

Obviously, I could install a Flatpak to do that instead and waste far more resources 8)

3 comments

gerdesj

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jeroenhd  4 hours ago

What inxi commnd shows a map of pollen concentration, weather alerts, and air quality? How do you generate a graph comparing this year's temperatures to the previous yeas' average climate?

Comparing inxi to Windows Weather is like comparing vi to Autodesk. You can make 3d graphics for sure, but it's not exactly comparable.

When I run inxi -w, I get this:

    Weather:
     Message: Error: Your access to this resource has been blocked. Automated
       requests or excessive use are not permitted. This is clearly stated in
       both the help menu and man page. If you want a CLI weather tool for
       routine use, try wttr.in, or use a weather widget. Remember, you never
       had a "right" to this feature, it was just a little easter egg, mostly
       for sys admins, which has instead been consistently abused. If you want
       to know your local weather, look out your window, there it is.

Looks like something in my powerline config somewhere must be querying too much? I can't find anything on my systems, must be a very old misconfiguration on my end. I still think I prefer the Microsoft tool.