It’s very frustrating when I can’t get a program from my Linux distro’s repositories. Ubuntu and Kubuntu share the same repos and while there’s a huge array of applications available there, not everything makes it and I’m forced to choose between going without or slogging through compiling the application from source which is something I can do, but I’m totally uncomfortable with. Using apt-get with the correct repositories is safe, fun and leaves me slightly giddy at the sheer glut of shit I can access for free. Compiling from source, meddling with dependencies and running the risk of breaking something, while a really good feeling when all goes well, more often than not drives me up the wall. Maybe in a few more years I’ll scoff at the challenges of wrangling source tarballs, but until then, I’ll take the repos, please.

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What with my recent switch to KDE and Kubuntu, I’ve been playing around with the host of new programs available at my beck and apt-get. True I could easily have run many, if not all the KDE oriented programs I wanted under Gnome, but since I was all up in that Gnome-ness, I never really bothered even looking.

Out of all these new applications, one that has immediately become one of my all-time favorites is Akregator, the RSS feed aggregator for KDE.

Akregator is hands down the best damn RSS app I’ve ever used. For the past couple of years, I’ve been eschewing desktop programs for the Firefox extension Sage due in main part to the fact that none of the apps I ever tried out had usefulness that warranted running a separate program to browse feeds. Sage was simple, light and worked well at what it was supposed to do. It also worked from within Firefox. The downside was that Sage did not automatically fetch feeds. I had to manually check them, which I didn’t like. If I have to manually check, I almost might as well just visit the site.

Akregator sits in my task bar and I’ve set it up to check all my forty of fifty feeds every three minutes. Feeds can be prioritized, and customized with special notifications, archiving—all kinds of wacky, mind-bending shit. It’s just about everything I’ve ever wanted in an RSS aggregator.

If you can manage running it, get it. When you do, you can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed and die happy.