Desktop based feed readers or RSS or, reading “Web Feeds” in general has become quite popular in the recent years, as it saves you the trouble of manually going over to web site by website, looking for updates.
Now concerning GNU/Linux, there are quite a few that you can try nowadays. If you’re looking for something that’s quite balanced (features vs simplicity), then “LifeRea” is a pretty popular one. However, if you’re looking for something a bit more simple, then this other one called “Blam” is also a pretty excellent feed reader that you should check out.
The interface is written in GTK+ toolkit mainly and, the web site rendering (inside the reader) is done via the popular WebKit (web page rendering engine used by Google Chrome/Chromium and many others) where in the past, it used the Mozilla’s own Gecko engine.
Few main features …
*. Very user friendly and a simple UI.
*. Supports Rss and Atom feeds.
*. Add/Remove or Edit current channels (including user logins).
*. Create feed Groups.
*. Change update intervals manually.
*. Four built in themes.
*. Mark as read or “unread” later (you can also set it up to automatically mark as “read” a feed after a certain period).
*. Export/Import the feed URLs.
*. Refresh the list manually.
*. Send to Print … are some of its main features to mention.
You can install Blam feed reader in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by simply typing the below command in your Terminal window.
sudo apt-get install blam
The icons and some of the buttons look a bit outdated. Other than that, I’m also quite happy with its web feed loading speeds (could be due to the “WebKit integration :)) plus with the speed of the app itself. Good luck.
