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About Planet FOSS

Linux and open source news, gathered from across the universe

Planet FOSS collects what blogs, magazines, projects and video channels publish about Linux and free software – in German and English, on one page, in magazine style. Every card shows a short preview and links straight to the original article. You read the full story where it was written.

  • 129sources in orbit
  • 47 / 82German / English
  • 352articles in the last 7 days
  • 5 minbetween updates

How it works

  1. 1

    Collect

    Every few minutes Planet FOSS reads the RSS and Atom feeds of its sources. For the card it uses only what the site itself provides for link previews: title, short description, preview image (Open Graph).

  2. 2

    Sort

    A dictionary of more than 500 terms and a small statistical model put every article into sections such as Desktop, Distros or Self-hosting. Product names with version numbers become topics: Ubuntu 26.10, GNOME 51, Firefox 158.

  3. 3

    Bundle

    When several sources report the same news, Planet FOSS shows one card with “Also at …” instead of five near-identical ones. On a topic page the bundle opens up again and every article gets its own card.

  4. 4

    Weigh

    What many sources cover, what readers star and what is fresh moves to the top. Nobody picks the lead story by hand – and nobody can buy it.

What you see here

✦ Supernova
A topic suddenly covered by at least four sources within a day, in both languages or across different kinds of sites. It gets its own band at the top of the page. At most two at a time.
☄ Comet
A topic picking up speed: three sources within twelve hours. Comets sit in the “In orbit” bar below the header – some of them become a supernova.
Afterglow
When a supernova cools down, the topic stays visible for a while before it moves to the archive.
New topics
Names Planet FOSS has never seen before – a new app, a new project – are picked up on their own as soon as several sources mention them within two days.
★ Starred by you
Articles readers have marked with a star. Starred articles stay near the top longer and are collected on their own page for seven days.
The solar system
The list of all sources, with language, kind and how much they published this week. Show sources →

Stars without an account

Anyone can star an article – no account, no cookie, no login. To keep bots out, your browser solves a small arithmetic puzzle that takes a fraction of a second. Planet FOSS then stores a random token in your browser so you can take the star back. It does not know who you are.

Privacy

No cookies, no tracking, no third-party scripts, no fonts from Google: everything is served from planetfoss.net. Your language and theme choice stay in your own browser. Planet FOSS itself stores no IP addresses. Privacy policy →

Advertising

Planet FOSS does not use an ad network. Companies from the Linux world can book a sponsored card that looks like the other cards and is clearly labelled “Sponsored”. Ads never appear as the lead story, are counted without personal data and have no influence on what else appears. Right now there are no ads at all.

For site owners

Planet FOSS is meant to send you readers, not keep them. That is why it follows a few firm rules:

  • Every card links directly to your article – no framing, no copies, no full text.
  • Only preview data your site provides itself (feed, Open Graph). Your robots.txt and meta robots apply: max-snippet, max-image-preview, nosnippet and noindex are respected automatically.
  • Publishers’ previews are limited to 200 characters.
  • The crawler identifies itself as PlanetFOSS/…, fetches each feed at most every few minutes and only reads the head of article pages.
  • Want to be removed, or want your site added? A short email is enough (address in the imprint). Removal happens right away.

Who is behind it

Planet FOSS is run by Christoph Langner, who writes about Linux on his blog Linux und Ich and for magazines such as LinuxUser. It is a one-person side project, independent of any company.

Follow along

Every section, topic and source has its own RSS feed – look for the RSS link at the bottom of the page. Missing a good source? Suggest it by email. Main feed →