This is the new akregator from Plasma 5. It was also available for 42.2, but so was the old akregator.
Yes, it has a few bugs.
When I hold my mouse pointer over the tray icon, I see a popup that says “26 unread articles”. I seem to recall that you did not need to hold the mouse pointer over it for the old akregator. Incidentally, the default is for the akregator icon to be hidden unless there are unread articles. Unless you have changed that, there are unread articles whenever you can see the icon in the tray. Otherwise it will be in the hidden tray.
There is an icon in the search bar. Click that, and you can choose between “All articles”, “New Articles”, “Unread Articles”, “Important Articles”. The choice is still there, just moved. It is also broken (perhaps by design).
You set it to show unread articles. You now see a list of unread articles. You click on one of them. It is immediately marked as read, and disappears from the list. And you are not moved to the next unread article. And the same happens again. Almost instantly, all articles are marked as read and disappear. This has been reported as bug 1015011. I’m not sure if it is reported upstream (at kde.org).
My workaround for dealing with this is to go to the Advanced settings, and set it to mark an article as read after 60 seconds (instead of the default 0 seconds). That gives me 60 seconds to read it before it disappears. It I expect it to take longer than 60 seconds, I switch back to showing “All Articles”. If I finish reading in less than 60 seconds, I can click CTRL-E to mark it as read.
Maybe in 42.2 I was still using old Akregator. I have searched now with yast and it seems now there is only one version.
I see that the timeout for marking the article as read is max 99s … not sure if it is enough to read them but at least it will be enough to launch the articles in firefox.