KDE 3.4 brought Akregator into the standard release, so I moved one concrete morning routine into it: read a few dozen project feeds, stop halfway, and continue later through Kontact.

The first useful behavior is dull but essential: read state survives. I marked a few entries read in Akregator, closed Kontact, fetched another batch, and reopened it. Old articles stayed read and new ones remained easy to spot. A feed reader that forgets this turns every restart into archaeology.

Kontact integration matters because it doesn’t create a second, slightly different copy of the feeds. Opening the Akregator component in Kontact and the standalone application showed the same subscriptions and article state. Links still opened through KDE’s normal browser handling, so reading a project post didn’t require a new set of application preferences.

I also disconnected the network before opening cached entries. Text already fetched remained available, while a refresh failed visibly instead of silently marking feeds current. That’s the sort of release behavior I care about: the application is honest about which state is local and which depends on the network.

Duplicate handling needed a closer look. Several feeds republish an item with corrected text, and some are careless with identifiers. Akregator mostly kept the list stable rather than presenting every refresh as breaking news. Where a feed changed identity as well as content, the duplicate was at least explainable from the source.

There are rough edges. Feed folders and filters invite more organization than I want before coffee, and malformed feeds remain somebody’s debugging exercise. I resisted building a taxonomy and kept three folders.

This is a small addition to a large desktop release, but it shows the advantage of KDE’s shared parts. Akregator can live inside Kontact, hand links to the usual browser, and use familiar shortcuts without pretending feed reading is a separate universe.

After a week, the best result is that I can stop reading and trust the list when I return. That’s enough; the feeds don’t need to become a lifestyle.