My phone is broken and I neeeed to listen to my podcasts while this is resolving. I thought it would be simple enough but I have been banging my head for days now.
There are lots of rss readers and podcatchers.
Ideally the downloading and listening would be integrated. Failing that, I can put up with 2 separate steps.
I can do the downloading although it's kind of clunky. Best for this are RSSGuard and Gpodder. But once you get the files, things totally break down.
minimally require:
track listening status
properly access metadata, not just going by filenames.
most crucially: name of podcast, episode title, published date, download date
maybe the downloader has some role to play in writing file/metadata correctly but the ones I have tried don't seem to do it
don't need to make an account/server to do the above
I tried everything in arch/aur repos. A few of them had totally broken UIs not sure what the deal is. I am open to TUI options but none seemed viable.
I can think of three apps that I have used and liked (since you didn't mention that you tried that them already)
Cpod, Kasts and Vocal. See if any of them works for ya
Damn. Sorry you're going through this. See if gnome's podcasts works for ya? Btw, cpod works for me just fine on fedora. I actually just tried it. I got it as a flatpak, though Maybe try the flatpak app and see if that works? 🤞