RSS Reader Suggestions for a minimalist desktop

Ophi

More and more, I'm starting to follow RSS Feeds for updates on the many sites I want to keep track of for interesting articles. The problem is, I can't find a good RSS Reader that meets the needs for my desktop.

Right now I'm running a minimalist Fluxbox desktop (GTK1/GTK2, QT, no Motif) and quite frankly I really don't want to pull in a whole bunch of Gnome or KDE dependencies for any of my applications. So I'm trying to find a well-behaved reader that will work in that kind of environment. I'm not opposed to going outside x86-stable for this, nor will I get worked up if the GUI isn't ultra-pretty (Pears would be fine if it behaved well). I do NOT want a console based reader, Gui-based apps please!

Stuff I've tried:

Liferea (on a Fedora 6 Box with Gnome) - I like the functionality for the most part although I don't go gaga over it. Too many Gnome dependencies for my tastes.
Pears - It's GTK+ app with minimal dependencies, but I find it a more than little sluggish (like it's locking up the GUI thread for an excessive amount of work to retrieve items in each feed). It also seems kinda weird about large feeds.
Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 - I've already got it on this machine as a mail reader, but it's really, really flaky about updating feeds for some reason. I end up getting a pile of duplicate entries every time I update all my feeds.
Vienna (a Mac OSX RSS Reader) - Love the interface and behaviour, but afaik it's OSX-only

Suggestions?

Ophi

edit: if I whiffed on the right forum for this, please move it with my apologies.

ashtophet · Guru Joined: 08 Aug 2004 Posts: 397

If you use mozilla firefox as your web browser, I'd suggest sage extension:

http://sage.mozdev.org/

I've used it for months and found it reasonably lightweight, pretty (many css styles available and, of course, customizable) and usable. Right now I'm on Gnus for reading rss.

Ophi · Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 5:03 am Post subject:

Yeah, I've heard of Sage in the past. I'm one of those "4 FF instances open with 10+ tabs each" kind of people so I'm not sure I'm really interested in an RSS reader so thoroughly tied into the my browser due to the crash factor.

Thunderbird seems to be better behaved today, but I'm still not all that impressed with it as an RSS reader. I'll stay on the lookout for something that catches my fancy. Any additional suggestions appreciated.

i92guboj · Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 5:07 am Post subject:

claws-mail (previously sylpheed-claws) can do this with mail-client/claws-mail-rssyl, also in portage.

EDIT, no gnome libs, just gtk2

Ophi · Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 5:00 am Post subject:

I've had claws-mail with the rssyl plugin going for a while, but it's behaviour is pretty much in line with Thunderbird (which I don't like for RSS). I'm thinking about trying out something like rawdog or amphetadesk. Any thoughts?

MxxCon · n00b Joined: 01 Apr 2005 Posts: 31

what about http://www.google.com/reader ?