RSS Part 8: Liferea

Liferea is advertised as “the free news aggregator on your Linux desktop.” It uses the GTK widget toolkit and seems to be designed with GNOME in mind.

Impressions

I installed the latest version of Liferea using my package manager. Since I already had the (large) dependencies installed, the total download size was less than a megabyte!

$ sudo pacman -S liferea

The user interface works fine, without any of the artifacts that I have with QuiteRSS. It seems that my system has issues with Qt but not GTK.

When first running the program, it loads fourteen example feeds organized into a hierarchy. This serves as good documentation by example, and it is easy to remove all of the examples by right-clicking on the “Example Feeds” folder and selecting Delete in the popup menu.

I immediately notice some extremely annoying behavior: the Liferea window disappears whenever I switch to a different window (such as my web browser). I have to click the icon in the system tray to make it appear again. Surely this is not by design. I booted a Debian Live image in a VM to see how it behaves in Gnome. In Gnome, with the default settings in the image that I used, the Liferea icon is not shown in the system tray at all, as Gnome has a macOS-style user interface. The window does not disappear when I switch to a different window. I suspect that the annoying behavior is a bug that happens in tiling window managers. Searching for a solution, I found a blog post about switching from Thunderbird to Liferea as a feed reader that provides a solution! Select Tools | Plugins in the menu to open the “Plugin Installer” window. By disabling the “Tray Icon (GNOME Classic)” plugin, the issue is resolved.

I was able to import my OPML file without issue. The hierarchy of folders loaded fine! As with QuiteRSS, there were two things that I fixed manually:

• The folders are not sorted; the user configures the order. After loading the OPML file, the folders were in a pretty random order. Liferea makes sorting them very easy, however! Right-click on a folder and select Sort Feeds to sort the sub-folders and feeds in the selected folder. Nice! Unfortunately, sorting result in all folders being opened, which is annoying.
• Feeds are displayed within the folders. Nice! Since they are not displayed in Thunderbird, I have to create a folder per feed. Those folders are imported into Liferea, so I manually removed them.

Note that these are both necessary only because the feeds are imported from my OPML file that was exported from Thunderbird. In the case of starting with Liferea, one would configure the folders and feeds appropriately from the beginning.

As with QuiteRSS, feed titles default to the those specified in the feeds, but users can set a better name when desired. This is the best way to design it, IMHO.

The performance of checking all feeds is reasonable. Unfortunately, Liferea does not have trash functionality. Without it, one must be much more careful about deleting items, greatly reducing the efficiency of feed processing.

I configured the browser preferences to not open links in Liferea’s window. When displaying an item, clicking on the item title opens the item link in my external browser. Thanks to the Liferea FAQ, I learned about a Firefox option that prevents Firefox from stealing the focus when opening a link!

browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground

With this setting set to true, links are loaded in the background in both Liferea and Thunderbird. There is no indication at all that the link is being loaded, however. I will try it out, and it is possible that I will end up reverting to the old behavior if I run into any problems with links not loading.

Item links can be copied via a right click. Podcast enclosures are displayed in an attachment list, and URLs can be copied via a right click.

Item descriptions look fine. Japanese is displayed without issue, tables look great (better than QuiteRSS and Thunderbird), and images are displayed by default. Application font preferences are not provided, by my system defaults look fine.

Liferea does not have options for enabling/disabling image loading, but it has some other nice features. “Reader mode,” which strips all non-content elements like scripts, fonts, and tracking, is enabled by default. “Intelligent tracking prevention” is also enabled by default. Nice! Like QuiteRSS, Liferea has support for authenticated feeds.

I added the feed that Thunderbird refuses to load due to validation issues, and Liferea handles it without any problems. The FAQ indicates that it performs validation, but it seems to handle (small) validation errors well. Nice!

Liferea has support for a feature that I wish I had in Thunderbird: conversion filters! A conversion filter is a script that can transform the source file of the feed. I wanted such a feature in order to make invalid feeds work in Thunderbird: I could write a script to fix the validation errors so that the feeds load. Liferea loads my only current problematic feed, so I would not need to write a conversion filter for it, but I may want to subscribe to a problematic feed in the future, and this feature would make it possible!

Liferea has support for periodic checking. A global setting can be configured, and each feed can be configured to use the global setting, use a custom setting, or never update automatically. This is a great design! I was able to disable notifications by disabling the Popup Notifications plugin in the “Plugin Installer” window.

I do not really like the look of the user interface. It is very apparent that the program is designed for GNOME. For example, windows do not provide a way to close the window since it assumes that the window manager displays a close button. My window manager does not, so I need to use keyboard shortcuts to close the window. It is not a huge issue at all, but I just do not like the macOS/GNOME-style user interface design, and I am not really a fan of programs that have that design even under other window managers.

Liferea stores its configuration and data according to the XDG specs: configuration is stored in ~/.config/liferea and the cache is stored in ~/.cache/liferea. I really like this, as I prefer to not have applications add to the clutter of hidden directories in my home directory. Following this convention is one very positive aspect of the GNOME ecosystem. The size of the database is very reasonable, making backup easy.

My Client Requirements

How does Liferea measure up to my client requirements?

Liferea meets my essential requirements. It is fast as well as intuitive to use, with good keyboard shortcuts. It works with all of my feeds, even the invalid feed that Thunderbird refuses to load. It is a native applications and performs very well.

Liferea uses my system default fonts, and they look fine. It has good support for multiple languages. HTML content is displayed fine, including images and tables. Reader mode and tracking protection is provided.

Liferea allows me to organize feeds hierarchically, allowing me to optimize the order that I process them. The hierarchy is implemented much better than in Thunderbird. Unfortunately, there is no trash support. It can check feeds manually as well as periodically, with great usability for such configuration. I am able to turn off all notifications.

Overall, I am impressed with Liferea. It is better than Thunderbird in many aspects, and it even does some things better than QuiteRSS (sorting functionality and periodic checking options). I do not plan on using it, however because the lack of trash functionality hurts my efficiency too much.