Friday, 12 Jan 2007
When it comes to News Aggregators (RSS Feed Readers) under Linux, you’ve got dozens of different applications to choose from … Ones that come with shiny GTK/QT interfaces and othershttp://www.gnome.org/projects/straw/images/shots/straw-main-8.png that are console based … Ones that are shipped with CooL features and others that follow the KISS(Keep it Simple Stupid) rule. One way or another, I hope that this article will aid you in choosing a proper News Aggregator.
Note:
Click on the Screenshots for a better resolution.
Liferea
Liferea is a fast, easy to install and easy to use News Aggregator for GTK+/GNOME … It can inform you about news using pop-ups, it also allows you to organize your feeds in folders, it uses a 3 pane simple interface and it has a neat panel notification icon.
Straw
Straw is a news aggregator for the GNOME 2 desktop … It heavily depends on Python … Takes some time to install owing to the large number of dependencies it needs … Though one of the features I love about it is the ability to keep or delete the news with a single click.
Raggle
Raggle is a console based News Aggregator written in Ruby … Has customizable keybindings, OPML export/import, themes, Screen support and Browser auto-detection.
Akregator
Akregator is a News Aggregator for the KDE desktop … It’s one of the most powerful News Aggregators out there with tons of features … Owing to its integration with Konqueror; you could easily add feeds to it while browsing a certain website with Konqueror … As it supports Kparts; you could easily open the news in an embedded-tabbed Konqueror instance .. which makes it one of the most functional aggregators out there.
RSSOwl
RSSOwl is a platform-independent News Aggregator written in Java … It lets you gather, organize, update, and store information from any compliant source in a convenient, easy to use interface. But since it’s written in Java, then I don’t think it would be the fastest aggregator out there .. Wish I had the chance to try it … Here is a tutorial in case you want to give it a try.
Snownews is yet another Console based News Aggregator with some cool features … It has a customizable color support, fully customizable key bindings and supports plugins/extensions.
To sum things up:
There is a variety of choices, and no one will decide for you, this article is just meant to assist you in your choice and save you sometime. For me, I’ve used Liferea when I was a GNOME user and now since I moved to KDE, I’ve been using Akregator as it’s full of powerful features as you can see … Console based aggregators are cool and are really worth a try.
