Most of us start the day the same way: a phone in one hand, coffee in the other, and a dozen apps competing for our attention. News sites full of pop-ups, autoplaying videos and feeds designed to keep us scrolling. I wanted something calmer. So I built it. Meet Kuratoren – a free, open-source desktop app for Linux that gathers news from sources you trust into one quiet, chronological stream.
Kuratoren is Norwegian for “the curator”, and that is exactly the idea: you decide what goes into your stream. No recommendation engine, no tracking, no ads and no account. Just the sources you have chosen, fetched directly from the source and shown in the order they were published.
One stream for the news you trust
Kuratoren reads ordinary RSS and Atom feeds, which means it works with practically every news site and blog on the web. Paste the address of a website and Kuratoren will try to discover its feed automatically. There is no algorithm deciding what you should see next – just the latest stories from the outlets you have chosen, in the order they were published.
Everything lands in a single stream, sorted by time. You can search within the stream, show only unread items, or mark everything as read when you have seen enough.
Distraction-free reading
Click an article and Kuratoren opens it in a clean reading view. The app fetches the page and pulls out the actual article text – using the same technology as Firefox’s Reader View – so you are left with the headline, the images that belong to the story and well-set text in a comfortable font. No cookie banners, no autoplaying videos, no “you might also like”. You can adjust the text size, and the original article is always one click away if you want it.
Your own archive – as plain Markdown files
Found something worth keeping? Click Save to archive. Kuratoren converts the article to a Markdown file with the title, date and a link to the source, and saves it in ~/Dokumenter/Kuratoren-Arkiv/ on your own computer. No cloud service, no proprietary database – just ordinary text files that you can open in any editor, sync with your own tools, or import into note apps such as Obsidian.
The My Archive tab lists everything you have saved, and the search field filters instantly as you type, across both titles and full text.
A morning briefing – with AI, if you want it
At the top of the stream sits a button called Generate Morning Briefing. It takes the 20–30 most recent unread items and asks an AI model to sum them up in five short, sober bullet points – no clickbait, no drama, just what actually happened. It is the perfect way to get an overview before you decide what to read in full.
The feature is entirely optional and you choose the provider yourself: enter your own API key for OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude) or Google Gemini, or run everything locally with Ollama. With Ollama, no data ever leaves your machine. Not sure which model name to type? Click Fetch models and Kuratoren lists the models your key actually has access to – so the app keeps working as providers release new models and retire old ones.
Sources you control
Kuratoren ships with a source catalogue of around 120 openly available feeds from established, editorially accountable news organisations in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada – public broadcasters such as NRK, SVT, DR, Yle, RÚV, the BBC, NPR, PBS and CBC, alongside major newspapers, business media and science and technology outlets. Every feed has been checked to work, and outlets known for spreading conspiracy theories are deliberately left out.
Pick a region, click the sources you want, or add a whole region at once. A small selection is enabled by default so you have something to read right away. You can of course add any other site yourself, and your source list can be imported and exported as OPML, so you can easily bring your subscriptions over from another feed reader.
Kuratoren is deliberately built for text. Earlier test versions also tried to handle YouTube channels and podcasts, but video and audio playback added complexity and distraction without fitting the purpose of the app, so those features were removed. There are excellent dedicated apps for that.
Light, fast and made for Linux
Kuratoren is built with Tauri and Rust instead of Electron. All the fetching of feeds and web pages happens in a small, fast Rust backend, while the interface uses the system’s own web engine (WebKitGTK). The result is an app that starts quickly and uses far fewer resources than you might expect from a modern desktop application. The interface has a dark theme that is easy on the eyes, and it is available in seven languages: English, Norwegian, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese.
Your settings and source list are stored locally as JSON in ~/.local/share/kuratoren/. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you have enabled an online AI provider yourself.
Free software under the GPL v3
Kuratoren is free and open-source software, released under the GNU General Public License v3.0. You are free to use it for any purpose, study how it works, change it, and share it – including your own improved versions, as long as they remain under the same license. The full source code is available below.
Download Kuratoren 1.1.0
Kuratoren is distributed as an AppImage: a single file that runs on most modern 64-bit Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint and openSUSE. There is nothing to install – download it, make it executable and run it.
⬇ Download Kuratoren 1.1.0 (AppImage, 95 MB)
Version 1.1.0 · Linux x86_64 · GPL v3 · Source code (zip)
How to run it
After downloading, open a terminal in the folder where the file was saved and run:
chmod +x Kuratoren_1.1.0_amd64.AppImage
./Kuratoren_1.1.0_amd64.AppImageYou can also right-click the file in your file manager, choose Properties → Permissions, tick “Allow executing file as program”, and then double-click it.
If you get an error message about FUSE, your system is missing a small library that AppImages need. On Ubuntu and Debian you can fix it with sudo apt install libfuse2 (on Ubuntu 24.04 and newer the package is called libfuse2t64).
Want to build it yourself?
The source code includes a README with full build instructions. In short, you need Rust, Node.js and the Tauri dependencies for Linux (including libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev), after which npm install and npx tauri build produce the AppImage.
Take back your morning
Kuratoren is not trying to be everything. It is not a social network, it does not want your attention for as long as possible, and it will never show you an ad. It simply brings together the things you have chosen to follow, lets you read them in peace, and helps you keep what matters. If that sounds like the kind of morning you would like, give it a try – and feel free to let me know what you think.
Kuratoren is developed by Rune Slettebakken and released as free software under the GNU GPL v3.