I used to adore the Feedbro extension for Firefox - until I learned that browser extensions are a privacy concern and stopped using them. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find anything similar for the Linux desktop. I just can’t seem to find the ‘sweet spot’ with all the readers I’ve tried. Some are bloated with features and complicated configurations that I will never use. Others are too simplistic. Still others haven’t seen an update in years. I feel like this is an impossible quest.
The readers I have tried (and discarded):
- Liferea
- RSS Guard
- News Flash
- Feeds
- Feed Deck
- Feed Flow
- Akregator
- Thunderbird
- Raven Reader
Here are the features I need:
- FOSS (obviously)
- Import/export OPML
- Scale the size of the UI and all text elements
- RSS feed discovery
- Fetch full articles
- Configure update interval
- Privacy-conscious
- Desktop only (I am currently unable to self-host)
Things that would be nice, but I can live without if I have to:
- Dark mode
- An uncluttered, two-column display
That’s about it. Now tell me that I am asking too much and there’s no hope for me. :D
What was the trouble with Akregator? I think recent versions have dark mode, and older versions could be made dark with the right style sheets applied.
It’s not a perfect fit for me, but it works well enough that I stopped hunting for something better.
If I remember correctly, Akregator wouldn’t allow me to resize the text to make it more readable. Also, I believe it was having trouble downloading a few of my feeds for some reason.
That makes sense.
It has some font size controls in Settings: Configure Akregator: Appearance: Font Size. I think these sliders apply to the article bodies.
It uses built-in style sheets for the size of other text, like headings, so changing that probably requires the program to be recompiled. In case you have those skills and want to make those changes, have a look in this file: src/formatter/html/style.css