Doesn't Linux have a decent usenet reader?

[marc]

qamelian said...
> 
> I guess it's a matter of taste. The only newsreader i ever liked on
> Windows was Xnews. Other than that, Pan is my app of choice and I
> consider it to be more than "decent".

When I tried Pan last year - because there are claims floating around 
that it is Gravity-like - the devs asked me for precise details of what 
I believed it lacked. Being a tech author - with one hat - I obliged. 
Seems to me that my input was firmly binned. Fair 'nuff.

Ugliness with Pan starts with displaying threading with the subject 
field. This is, and always will be, silly. It's terribly 
geek-"logical" - coz it's the subject that's threaded - but it's 
completely the wrong field to use to display it, because it quickly goes 
haywire.

Next, simply right-click an article when the article pane doesn't have 
focus. Oh dear! A blank menu. Give it focus - it forces an article 
download - and then it works. That's barking mad. Once downloaded, you 
can't mark articles in any way. In fact, even when the article pane has 
focus, right-clicking another article doesn't select that article, but 
display the menu that applies to the previously selected article. This 
is pants. It's really badly done.

I can see why. Pan takes the myopic view that the user is either online 
or off-line, and when online it's going to download everything that;s 
clicked. Oh dear.

And don't get me started on the filtering.

Pan is kind of close to being okay, but it misses key requirements by 
the proverbial mile. And that's what's so frustrating about it. It's 
almost very good, but the flaws are so bad that it's unusable, imo.

-- 
Best,
Marc