  We study the viscous damping of r-modes of compact stars and analyze in
detail the regions where small amplitude modes are unstable to the emission of
gravitational radiation. We present general expressions for the viscous damping
times for arbitrary forms of interacting dense matter and derive general
semi-analytic results for the boundary of the instability region. These results
show that many aspects, like in particular the physically important minima of
the instability boundary, are surprisingly insensitive to detailed microscopic
properties of the considered form of matter. Our general expressions are
applied to the cases of hadronic stars, strange stars, and hybrid stars, and we
focus on equations of state that are compatible with the recent measurement of
a heavy compact star. We find that hybrid stars with a sufficiently small core
can "masquerade" as neutron stars and feature an instability region that is
indistinguishable from that of a neutron star, whereas neutron stars with a
core density high enough to allow direct Urca reactions feature a notch on the
right side of the instability region.
