Linux + offline Feed Reader = Liferea (insert cool Liferea logo here, does one exist?)
Before about a month ago, I used the Firefox extension Sage. I do not use Flock’s feed features much as they do not match my use.
Sage met the following feeding features:
1. Usable, can read articles from a feed.
2. Quick, convenient making articles read/unread, flagged, and delete
3. Search
4. Open source
5. Cross platform - Linux, MSWin, and MacOS
I also used Bloglines a little. I decided that being able to read feeds while not online is also important, and Sage and Bloglines does not:
6. Allow me to read feeds while offline
Contrary to what Waldo Jaquith says, Thunderbird has a horrible feed reader built into it. I used it painfully for the last month:
- I could not figure out how to download my feeds for reading when I am offline (5)
- Difficult to tell when Thunderbird is updating the feeds. Do I click "Get Mail"? For each "account"?
- Settings in a couple different places. Not sure even what some of them mean. I do not want the default to be to remove articles when they are no longer in the feed which is what "To recover disk space, old messages can be permanently deleted [User server defaults]" seems to suggest to me.
- Feel is not consistent with the primary Thunderbird functionality of mail reading
- Why do folders have little satellites next to them? How come I can’t put other folders (feeds) in a folder?
- Adding a feed feels awkward
I started my search last night while at SHDH. Because there are no good software rating sites, I started my search from Wikipedia’s "List of news aggregators", I tried and eliminated Straw and Blam as possible choices after discovering that they do not allow grouping feeds into collections. I have previously tried BlogBridge and found it slow in reading and deleting down a list of a articles — I am a Java hater though too so that definitely influenced me, I did not tried RSSOwl for that reason. I did not consider KDE feed readers.
This morning I switched to Liferea since Ubuntu Linux is the OS I primarily use.
Another feature met:
7. Ability to group feeds. (folders, collections, or something)
Features I miss:
+8. Feed discovery (like in Sage)
I am disappointed that I am no longer using a tool that is:
5. Cross platform - Linux, MSWin, and MacOS
For the long term (5) will have to be met. Hopefully, Flock will include in the future a feed reader I want to use and recommend.
I also long for:
+9. Feed reading from anywhere, a similar concept to Flock’s favorites from anywhere.
technorati tags: news reader, feed, rss reader, feed reader, atom, rss, ubuntu, breezy
7 Comments
Interesting analysis. I’m pretty much in the same boat in finding a decent feed reader for Ubuntu. I’m addicted to FeedDemon on Windows, which synchronizes subscriptions and read/unread states with http://www.Newsgator.com . Recently they acquired NetNewsWire for the Mac platform, so Linux is the only platform without a Newsgator-API enabled reader.
Yesterday I was desperate enough to try to setup FeedDemon in WINE under Linux. Didn’t quite work yet, but the trial of Crossover Office (commercial WINE) did the trick. But the performance wasn’t stellar, and that Win98 look!
I think I’ll stick to Windows for the time being, as this tinkering with Linux isn’t quite worth the effort…
Wow, Thunderbird’s feed reader does sound like a bummer. I’ve used it only on my USB dongle, when on the go. I imported an OPML file o’ feeds into it and I use it maybe once a month, just to flip through my key feeds (I’ve written RSS feeds for administrative functions on the back end of many of my sites), and liked it just fine. I’ve never needed to use it for some of the functions that you describe; other problems I haven’t noticed due to my limited use of it. (Hence Thunderbird being just a brief addition to the list.)
My complaint about Thunderbird’s feed-reading functions is that I’m not sure that’s the job of Thunderbird. Combining and RSS reader with a mail client seems a little too Mozilla-ish for me — why they ever combined a mail client, web browser, NNTP reader, IRC client and blender in one program in the first place, I can’t imagine. With Firefox and Thunderbird having been spun off from Mozilla, it’s ironic, at best, to see Thunderbird blithly strolling back down the Seamonkey path with the RSS bolt-on.
Thomas Stache, very interesting!
Chris “Factoryjoe” Messina has talked previously to the NetNewsWire / Newsgator people, I do not know what came of those talks.
I have consistently heard very good things about FeedDemon, though it is not OSS. I do not know how OSS friendly Newsgaot is, but I have heard very good things about their service.
There are so many great feed reading apps on MacOS, none of which are OSS.
Thank you Waldo Jaquith for your comments. I found your article “RSS for total newbies” to be great.
Interesting use of Thunderbird. I have never got the hang of USB-based live data storage.
If some of the data lives on the web, then if I want, my data should be able to live on the web, hence:
I know that Peter Andrew, the Sage lead developer, agrees with you that Thunderbird’s, a mail client, features don’t map cleanly to feed reading. I find my workflow to be quite similar without the activity of publishing (sending emails). To me, it feels like feed reading has not been integrated into Thunderbird, only casually put on top.
The Mozilla platform is the nature choice for a cross-platform feed reader, I look forward to one that:
The Liferea developer Lars Lindner wrote me that “Liferea is available for Cygwin and some while ago it was compiled for MacOS too.”
That is a great start, but neither are mom friendly.
Actually, Vienna looks quite promising for Mac.
Maybe I’m just getting old and worn out, but I’m no longer much of an open source purist. I’ll buy the occasional piece of shareware if it performs a useful function and the price is reasonable (I prefer buying from independent developers, but I made an exception for NNW since Brent used to be indie and is still a very accessible guy, plus his software rocks).
I was using Akregator on Kubuntu, it suited all of my purposes really well, except for wanting to access the list anywhere. I think at the moment you either need to compromise the usability and accessability, I don’t really want to use my reader through my internet browser. Although Sage was pretty good when it came to that, although again, not accessible from everywhere.
I changed to Ubuntu and Akregator seemed to work fine, I’ve installed Liferea to compare though since Akregator was meant for KDE.
Thanks for the tip.
2 Trackbacks
[...] Luis spells it out beautifully! I don’t think we are alone considering one of my top read articles is Linux + offline Feed Reader = Liferea. [...]
All praise the Wikipedia benevolent rulers!…
I am discouraged, unlike Vera an article I found useful not only was nominated for deletion, but actually deleted. List of news aggregators was found lacking and deleted. On the discussion page for this article, Harro5 wrote:
The article went through …