Eatfeed is a self-described ‘barebones’ feed reader “born out of frustration from the brokenness of programs like Liferea and RSSOwl” – which to be fair, can be frustratingly buggy!
Although we’ve seen many neat new desktop RSS readers appear of late, often powered by the Adobe Air platform, Linux users wanting to get timely news in a native app will want to sample Eatfeed to see if it suits their tastes.
And as it’s available on GetDeb it is very easy to install on Ubuntu.
But is it any good?
I tried it out and found it promising, if basic.
The current version doesn’t let you auto-mark items read on open (you have to do it manually) and it can’t sync with Google Reader either.
It requires GTK 2 and WebKit GTK to work properly. If you don’t have the latter then HTML rendering is disabled.
Adding new feeds is done easily enough (supports RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0), and a quick smush of the refresh button makes it easy to check for new stories any time you like. You can read items inside the app, no need to open a web browser.
As someone who checks RSS feeds obsessively, Eatfeed is an app I’ll be keeping an eye on. Linux is in dire need of a modern Web 2.0-style feed reader – one that caters to rich web content rather than austere plain-text style newsgroup-style stuff.
To try it out, download it from GetDeb [edit: link no longer active] grab the source from the developer’s website [link no longer valid].