When Google Reader died, in some sense RSS died with it. You used to see little RSS icons on every blog, RSS support was built into web browsers, but now it's getting harder to find RSS feeds and browsers started removing support for them.
Lately, especially as people get fed up with social media and want an alternative way to curate their own news feed, without selling your digital soul to big tech companies, RSS is slowly starting to get popular again with technically minded people. Recently, I started to care again about RSS as well. I only use decentralized social networks, I don't use Twitter or Facebook or any of the mainstream stuff, but I still want to read news. So I thought, why not try using RSS again.
First I needed to find a good app though, and for Linux no less because that's my main operating system right now. I wanted something well designed and simple that is fast and uses as few resources as possible, since I'm on an old Chromebook with only 2 GB of RAM and a 1.4 Ghz processor. If an app uses too many resources, I can only use that one app at a time, so I tend to stay away from those Electron based resource hogs if I can :)
At first I didn't find anything simple and modern looking and was about to just start writing my own, but then I found FeedReader. It's written in Vala using GTK3, which means it's as native as you can get on Linux, so it's lightweight and fast and the design is superb (if you like the GTK3 style, I do). It was originally an elementary OS app (to the best of my knowledge, after perusing Google search results for a while) which is the Linux distribution I'm using right now. It uses Vala as its official programming language, a Gnome language that compiles to C and adds Object Oriented concepts on top of it via GObject.
Nowadays however you can install FeedReader on any Linux distribution, it's distributed as a flatpak on flathub, so as long as you have flatpak installed you can install FeedReader by opening a terminal and executing:
flatpak install flathub org.gnome.feedreader
While FeedReader does support local RSS feeds, which is the way I'm using it, it can also integrate with a long list of online RSS services like feedly and FreshRSS.
Full list of supported online RSS services:
- Feedbin
- feedly
- FreshRSS
- InoReader
- Nextcloud
- The Old Reader
- Tiny Tiny RSS
And it also supports the "Read later" tools Instapaper, Pocket and Wallabag. Of course there is also a local/offline alternative here, you can just star articles you want to read later.
FeedReader's design is a convenient three pane layout, with feeds and categories on the left, a list of articles in the center, and the selected article displayed on the right. It also features a very neat fullscreen view that works like a presentation mode, where articles take up the whole screen and then you can go through all articles by clicking on the left or the right arrows on the side or by using the keyboard. I love using that feature to quickly read through articles when I lie back a short distance away from the computer.
One caveat of FeedReader is that when you just close its window, it keeps syncing your feeds in the background. If you don't want that because you want to keep the RAM usage down like I do, quit the app when you're done with it with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Q instead of closing its window, then both the app and the background daemon quit.
FeedReader is Open Source, licensed under GPL3, the code is available on Github.
Now as I said, FeedReader isn't a new app, but since it wasn't as easy to find because it's not in the Ubuntu repository, I wanted to share it here for other Linux users who might want to get back into using RSS as well and haven't found a good app yet to do so :)