Top 10 News Readers for Ubuntu (Overview & Screenshots)

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.

Full Story