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

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.

1. it’s easy to make fun of
2. it makes every other programming language look better in comparison