Looks good, but I decided not to list open source alternatives that you need to self host, since most non technical users wouldn't be able to do that.

Hehe, I'm quite sure most of the readers of HN are able to selfhost ;)

There are people[1] offering TinyTinyRSS hosting, though they almost hide that fact, which I find a little disagreeable.

[1] http://yanobs.com/reader/

I have mentioned this last time but http://jabs.nu/feedthemonkey is my TTRSS client written in Qt, doesn't do much though, only displaying unread articles in a window you can read and mark as read.

Would that also exclude Liferea?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liferea

Liferea is also what I'm using for the time being, but I think he's only listing cloud based Reader alternatives.

I've noticed an interesting side effect from using a desktop based aggregator that doesn't sync with a smartphone; while before I'd obsessively comb through new items throughout the day, sometimes even impacting conversations, now I read everything in one fell swoop when I turn on my personal laptop at the end of the day. No more pulling the phone out at awkward places and times, the productivity benefits, at least for me, are immense.

One could argue that it's down to discipline, but if you actually have a mechanism that enforces this behavior it makes things immensely easier.

I, unfortunately, am having a bad side effect: I'm not looking at the feeds at all. And I probably should be, as I'm "supposed to" be gearing up for a social media presence. Sigh.