All I wanted was a feed reader client app

I’m using Nextcloud for most of my computer related tasks. I’ve taken a long break from RSS feeds and followed my Twitter bubble instead, however, I want to get back to it and keep a closer eye on traditional news outlets to burst that bubble at least a little bit.

That being said, I don’t like Feedly or any of the other web based feed platforms. I already have enough tabs open and I know I’m not checking them regularly, so feeds in my Browser inevitably drown.

I could try to force myself to check that tab on a regular base, but I’d prefer to have a separate application for that. Programs need to be kept in sync somehow and since I already use Nextcloud for all my other syncing needs, might as well add feeds to that.

The ONLY client application I found that does this on Linux, was Feedreader. The problem? Installing it was super easy, running it? Not so much.

$ snap install --edge feedreader

This is pretty easy. However, on Kubuntu 18.04, this doesn’t work. While the application starts and even lets me login to my Nextcloud, it doesn’t sync at all. Instead, I’m greeted with the status message: Offline.

No dice!

The official documentation says to install Feedreader using Flatpak. Kubuntu doesn’t have Flatpak on board, so there are a couple of extra steps to take before this is possible.

$ sudo apt install flatpak
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

This allows us, to run the command from the Feedreader docs.

$ flatpak install flathub org.gnome.FeedReader

Compared to Snap, Flatpak requires a lot more dependencies to be installed.

The installation works fine, however, running the application only results in the following ugly message, followed by a crash.

I wanted a desktop app to read my news. I am in no mood to follow stack-traces and debug this sh*t. Dropped.

I’ll update this post, when and if I ever get this to run. Provided I’ll actually have the time and nerves to get back to this.

The moral of this story? While I love Linux and use it daily, I sometimes find it irritating how difficult and time-consuming the little things become.

If anyone knows of a good RSS client for Linux that supports sync with Nextcloud, let me know in the comments. :)