In Operation
Here’s an image of Alligator in action.
In the image above, we’ve added a few feeds including our own feed. Unread articles are marked with a light blue marker. It’s not a particularly attractive way to identify unread articles. We can also filter unread articles in the entries view, either for a specific feed or all feeds.
Excerpts of articles are shown. There’s a icon to open the complete article in a web browser.
The software offers a dedicated section to manage feeds which lets you refresh all feeds, add/delete a feed, and manage feed groups. The hamburger icon (far right) lets you export and import feeds.
Feed management is fine, although we managed to add a blank entry which stubbornly refused to be removed via the GUI. The only way to remove that blank feed was to navigate to ~/.local/share/KDE/alligator and delete the database.db3. At least the software lets us export our feeds, so we didn’t have the rigmarole of adding feeds back one by one.
There’s also a settings section which lets you delete an article list after a defined time period. We can also set the font size for articles. But that’s it.
Summary
Alligator is a basic but functional news aggregator. The program’s responsive design is good, as is support for Android. But in many respects the program is unremarkable.
Alligator is not particularly stable; the app is prone to crashing.
Alligator faces pretty stiff competition from a news aggregator perspective. We highlight our recommended news aggregators in our Internet section where we select our recommended graphical, terminal-based, and self-hosted news aggregators.
Website: apps.kde.org/alligator
Support: Code Repository
Developer: Tobias Fella
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Related Software
| Graphical News Aggregators | |
|---|---|
| NewsFlash | Follow your favorite blogs and news sites |
| Fluent Reader | Modern desktop RSS reader |
| Liferea | Three-pane GNOME based news aggregator |
| Folo | AI-powered news aggregator |
| Akregator | News feed reader for KDE |
| RSS Guard | Simple, light and easy-to-use RSS/ATOM feed aggregator |
| FeedDeck | RSS and social media feed reader, inspired by X Pro |
| Thunderbird | Popular free, cross-platform e-mail, RSS and newsgroup client |
| Feeds | News reader for GNOME |
| QuiteRSS | Qt5-based news aggregator for RSS and Atom news feeds |
| FeedReader | High quality RSS client for various webservices |
| Communique | Supports a wide range of RSS services and local RSS feeds |
| Alligator | Convergent, cross-platform feed reader, supporting standard RSS/Atom feeds |
| FeedFlow | Minimalistic RSS reader |
| Lettura | Built with speed in mind |
| TICKR | RSS reader displaying RSS feeds in a ticker bar |
| Raven Reader | Flexible settings to optimize your experience |
| Pulp | Skim excessive feeds |
| InfoDash | Displays RSS feeds, weather and stock information |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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