Ubuntu alternative for FeedReader3

I was writing a post a couple of days ago about how great FeedReader3 is. It’s definitely a neat tool when it comes to concentrating all your subscriptions in one place and handle them as you like. But what happens when you are using Ubuntu or other linux distros ? Unfortunately most of the alternatives that try to offer the same services as a Windows application don’t succeed (of course there are a few exceptions).

So what I will try to do is to pretty much compare a linux feed reader alterantive with FeedReader3. Currently i am using SuSe 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.10 and I have installed Liferea on both. It works like a charm. Unfortunately I am not aware of any kind of sync method between different OS’s. It is kind of annoying to lets say read your feeds on Windows and in the next 5 minutes or a couple of days, switch back to Ubuntu and have alerts regarding feeds that you have already read pop-up.

In terms of design FeedReader3 is similar to Liferea. You can choose between Normal, Wide and Combined layouts. For example I prefer the Wide layout because it looks the same as FeedReader3’s wide layout; the first panel contains your feed directory, the second one the feed content and the third one the article’s content or the built in browser when needed. A drawback is the need of selecting your preferred layout for each of your subscription, because as you browse them you will notice that the default layout for all of them is Normal. So basically you need to select the appropriate layout for each and every subscription.

Above the article’s content corresponding tags, categories and author’s name are shown, just like in FeedReader3. Also you have the possibility of increasing the font size for all of your content. Importing and exporting feed lists is of course a must-have and it can be done without any problems. An interesting feature is the possibility of posting your bookmarks to popular bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, reddit any many others. You can customize the behavior of popups which notify you whenever something new is posted. Enclosures are available for you to download and if needed a proxy configuration can be set up as well.

Liferea might be considered as a light version of FeedBurner3. It has the basic features of a feed reader and if you are just an ordinary subscriber with no particular high demands, it might do the trick for you.

A more detailed documentation is to be found on the official site. As far as installing, it has native support for Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSe, Gentoo and Mandriva distros. Check out the install page to find out how to install it on your distro. It took me less than 2 minutes to install it on Ubuntu 7.10

Here are a few screenshots:

However if you don’t feel comfortable with Liferea as your feed reader on Linux you can choose to use Akregator, Blam!, RSSOwl or Straw. I will more than surely put them to the test someday.