Ubuntu’s role in the ecosystem is important. They are good at first luring people into using linux. Then the users get pissed off of Ubuntu, because of Snap, ads, or whatever random crap they know from Windows. Finally, they move on to better options, be it Arch, Debian, or Puppy. Ubuntu ensures they don’t all stick to the same

Counter question: Why does everyone call it “engine X” and not “enjinx”, which would be the way cooler pronunciation?

Thank you. In that sense I find OP’s question misleading: Option 1 should be “guy who really likes to talk about the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project”

Good luck! The way I see it: Linux has its issues, but so do Windows and Mac OS (and others). The cool thing with Linux though is that for many problems you can create/find some form of error logs, google them, and someone online will help you. In most cases they have solved that problem already.

Windows problems often feel like black magic: Something doesn’t work, but all you can do is knock on your laptop, turn it off and on again, and pray. Unless you’re lucky and find a shady program online that you can download and install, hoping the programmers mean well.

With Mac OS, you can often solve problems by throwing money at them. But sometimes that doesn’t work and then you can’t do anything about them and just have to accept the one way to use your computer correctly.

So in that sense I don’t think Linux is “harder”. There are problems of course, but you learn to think differently about them and are often able to solve them.

Totally next to the linux guy. In fact, I was in such a situation on the train before. I was just there working and the person sitting next to me noticed I had a linux desktop (in fact, GNU/Linux, btw). They were curious and vaguely interested in switching to linux for a while, so we had a nice conversation about this.

I would not bring this up myself, but it’s cool that this happens sometimes (i.e., once in a few decades of life so far)

Actually, it’s GNU/GNU/Anything

TLDR: Just using an app on your laptop with good filters (newsbeuter!) might be all you need.

IMHO, RSS readers without decent filters are useless. If you are going to subscribe to even 10, 20 feeds, you will be flooded with articles and have no chance to go through them all. Unfortunately, that already removes 95% of readers from the options.

A long time ago, I had a TinyTinyRSS setup running. TTRSS offers amazing filters and sorting mechanisms, which made it stand out. For example, I subscribed to several dozens of job recruiting feeds and filtered out everything that didn’t match. You could also add new filters easily. So if you see many job posts for “Twist dancer” and that is not your thing, you can just filter them out and it gets better over time.

At some point though, TTRSS changed their deployment setup, I think to docker at the time, and I couldn’t be bothered reading up how to set it up back then. Something like that. I also heard that the developer is a Nazi, but this may well be wrong. Both together were somehow enough for me though to drop it and I left the RSS game for a while.

A few months ago I started again, but this time just on my laptop. Turns out, the main advantage of a server-based version is that you can read stuff on mobile, which I don’t do so much anyway. So first I tried Liferea, which kind of worked but I couldn’t wrap my head around the filter mechanism. It’s supposed to work, but I tried to figure out which part of the code in which exact format to put where exactly. Documentation and error logs suck, and after suffering for 2-3 hours I left it be. Turns out though, Liferea is mostly just a GUI for newsbeuter, and that is where I am now. The filter language is awkward, especially if you have an older version that doesn’t support pretty coding yet (I use Debian, btw). But it works and I’m happy with it now!

Other than that, although a bit beside your question: Many websites don’t bother including RSS feeds anymore these days, or even removed them to make people look at their ad infested websites. Whichever reader you pick, make sure it easily supports custom RSS feeds. I wrote a little Python script using BeautifulSoup and FeedGenerator to make my own feeds in such cases and newsbeuter can include them easily. There is also this project for that job:

https://git.sr.ht/~ghost08/ratt

but I didn’t look into it in detail.

Actually, it’s GNU/unkempt, bearded man

I’m quite optimistic about a usable Linux phone in the near future, maybe 5 years from now or so. When smartphones were a new thing, it was really hard for open source projects without a major company backing them to keep up with all the new developments. Hence all the projects that died out. But innovation on smartphones has basically come to a halt these days. Sure, your phone can get a little bit faster and have round displays now, but nobody cares anymore. Nothing of all that is essential. So, give it some time, we’ll get there.

Actually the Arch penguins jump happily on their own