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Top 10 News Readers for Ubuntu (Overview & Screenshots)

Posted by Chris7mas on · 8 comments
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Overview of 10 most popular feed readers for Ubuntu, including Liferea, RSSOwl, Akregator or BlogBridge.

Akregator This is the KDE-based feed reader with support for RSS feeds. Akregator comes with lots of features and it has a simple interface, with a tree-like view to the left side for the feeds list and a large area for reading news. It supports tabs, sharing to websites like Twitter or Identi.ca, while links and pages can be opened in an external web browser. It uses the WebKit engine for displaying web pages. It allows the configuration of its appearance, like font and colors, sharing services, article archiving and it support system tray integration.

Liferea Also called the Linux Feed Reader, Liferea is a full-featured news reader built in GTK, so I’d warmly recommend it for GNOME users. By default, Liferea’s interface is pretty much the same as Akregator, following the same style with a tree view to the left, and the news list and displaying widget to the right side. However it has three different view modes which change the alignment of the widgets (normal, wide and combined view modes). It supports system tray integration and has an option to disable JavaScript as well as modifying the font size.

Blam Blam is small with a clean interface and fewer options than Akregator or Liferea. It’s written in Mono GTK and it should fit those who don’t need an application with all the whistles and bells.

RSSOwl Written in Java, RSSOwl is a very powerful feed reader with support for RSS, RDF and Atom feeds. The first time it starts RSSOwl will show a wizard from which you can import pre-defined feeds, feeds from Google Reader or from a certain website. Being Java-based makes the interface a little slow when it comes to response time, but this is balanced by the richness of features that it provides. The latest version is 2.1.2 and you can download it from Sourceforge. The package contains the binary and you will need Java Runtime Environment or any other compatible Java virtual machine to run it.

RSSNOW OK, so RSSNOW is a Plasma widget for KDE which can be displayed on the workspace. Some find it very useful, making it a good choice since it just stays on the desktop, providing a very basic interface, appearance configuration and global keyboard shortcut.

Newsbeuter This one is a simple console news reader that runs in command-line mode, so it doesn’t have an ncurses interface and you have to configure it manually.

BlogBridge Yet another Java-based feed reader, BlogBridge offers some pretty cool features and a whole bunch of configuration options.

ThinFeeder This one is also written in Java and comes with various options.

Canto This is based on ncurses, so it runs in a terminal. You will have to use the keyboard in order to navigate in Canto, and press Q to quit it.

Thunderbird Thunderbird is well-known for being the email client from Mozilla, but it also incorporates a feed reader.

In addition to these, there is also Gnus Rss, a feed reader for Emacs, or Sage, a Firefox add-on with support for RSS and Atom feeds. Of course, the browser-based ones like Google Reader or Bloglines are available too and Firefox itself can handle feeds in a simple way.

There is also another one for GNOME called Straw, but it looks like it hasn’t been upgraded or maintained since 2008. And Raggle, a command-line reader which also seems dead since 2005.

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Comments (8)

kennethh ·
Bamboo https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bamboo-feed-r...

I'm currently testing it out, still have liferea installed but I think bamboo for me is here to stay.
Steven_Rosenber ·
How many of these applications run on systems that aren't Ubuntu? All of them, I would imagine.
nikkels ·
Slowly but sure, I am developing an allergy for: this for ubunti, that for ubuntu. Not only that, but all " this and that " I am using for years already.

English is not my native language, so, forgive me.... To me it looks like this: Finally this reader has arrived in ubuntu Finally this paint program has arrived in ubuntu Finally.......

I am going to be perfectly honestly with LXer staff. I fully realize what LXer is and what it does, but I am developing this feeling that I rather not come to here and read : Buntu this and Buntu that, every second article. nb: Got nothing against the Distro itself. Am using ArtistX too.

kennethh ·
I recall how when I too wanted gnu+linux to succeed and remembering how so many others wanted it to as well, succeed in competing and giving more choice to the everyday folk. Now it seems as though not everybody wants that, they are very anti-ubuntu and I agree to an extent.. While I don't agree with Unity on the desktop, nor do I like music players being switched up, windows buttons being moved amongst countless other thing--ubuntu does many things right/ There are always going to be goods & bads and you either accept that fact or simply ignore it like I do with goog and other websites/products/services.
BernardSwiss ·
Ubuntu was very exiting back in the Hoary Hedgehog and Dapper Drake days. but after Hardy Heron (8.04 LTS) the bad news started weighing more and more heavily. A big, successful, commercial and free Linux Desktop seemed to be a wonderful thing, but now Ubuntu seems bent demonstrating how a FOSS company can manifest many of the very same characteristics that drove people away from proprietary desktop OSs to (Gnu/)Linux in the first place.
djohnston ·
Quoting:I recall how when I too wanted gnu+linux to succeed and remembering how so many others wanted it to as well, succeed in competing and giving more choice to the everyday folk. Now it seems as though not everybody wants that, they are very anti-ubuntu and I agree to an extent..


@kennethh,

I believe the "anti-Ubuntuism" stems from the fact that too many Ubuntu users and article writers tend to portray Ubuntu as though it is the only Linux distro. Or that other distros are somehow not as "user-friendly" or as usable out of the box. As Steven_Rosenber has pointed out, the programs, most likely, will run on any flavor of Linux.

My other beef is the superlatives used to portray something associated with Ubuntu. Wallpapers and icon sets are described as "gorgeous" and applications are said to be "awesome", ad nauseum.

And, yes, Mark Shuttleworth is slowly eroding his original support base. Many see Canonical as drifting away from its original community-based and "humanity" credo.
Khamul ·
@nikkels: There's a couple of issues here.

1) For some stupid reason, the tech press and blog writers, when they write an article about "how to do X in Linux" or "top ten X programs on Linux" or some other dumb article-of-the-day about Linux to get pageviews, instead of saying "on/in Linux", they say "on/in Ubuntu" because they believe Ubuntu has the highest marketshare of Linux distros (which is probably true at the moment, but appears to be falling, though there's no real way to know since there's no reliable way of getting such stats, only indicators such as stats from certain websites). It's very annoying, because most things work the same across distros, and even things that don't will work the same across Debian-derived distros, of which Ubuntu is but one.

2) LXer is a news aggregator, and appears to have a policy of simply publishing anything that's remotely Linux-related, good or bad, though usually they seem to find out about these articles by user submissions (and the users are frequently the article authors themselves, trying to generate publicity for their articles so more people will click on them and gain them more advertising dollars). So if Ken Hess for example decides to write 100 inane Linux-related articles all in one day, and submits them all, LXer will publish all 100 articles, even if they're nothing more than Ken showing how to view pictures of cats in Linux. If this annoys you, your only real choice is to not visit this site; however, there isn't really much competition for it. The only other Linux news aggregation site I know of is LinuxToday.com, and it has serious problems and I'm frankly surprised it's still alive; their editor seems to frequently take several days off in a row, so no new articles are posted, and when he is around, it's pretty much the exact same articles as on here, with the same lack of filtering for quality. The commentary on there isn't very good though; there's one guy named Rainer Weikusat who posts frequently, half the time his comment being inane or almost nonsensical, and about a quarter of the time being spot-on or even brilliant at times; other than him there's very few regular posters, and a couple of trolls.
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tuxchick ·
Quoting: How many of these applications run on systems that aren't Ubuntu? All of them, I would imagine.


I think we're well past the point of any astonishment that Ubuntu is not the only Linux distro.

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