At the same time, the site collects more than 600 posts a week from over a hundred sources. If you don’t drop by every day, it’s easy to lose track of what actually mattered. That’s exactly what the new weekly review is for. PlanetFOSS also posts on Bluesky now, next to Mastodon, and the search can finally filter and page through results.

The week as a small magazine

Every Monday, PlanetFOSS sums up the past week on a page of its own. At the top, a few sentences give you the numbers of the week, along with key figures for posts, sources, supernovas and videos. In week 44, 115 sources published 659 posts, seven percent more than the week before. These sentences come from fixed templates and the numbers; no AI writes anything here.

Next comes the cover story, the news that most sources covered. In week 44, that was the return of Ubuntu Core Desktop, which twelve sources wrote about. Next to it, you see the headlines of the other reports, for example from It’s FOSS, GamingOnLinux or Linux-Magazin. After that come the supernovas of the week with an image and a quote, among them Ghostty 1.4 and KDE Plasma 6.8.

Further down, the review lists the other big stories, new releases that several sources wrote about, and the most noticed post in each section. In “The week in numbers”, you see which day was busiest and which sources were the most prolific; Phoronix, for example, came to 75 posts. On top of that, there are the videos of the week, the posts you starred, and an archive.

You’ll find the review at planetfoss.net/en/weekly/, and from Monday to Wednesday a banner on the front page points to it as well. If you’d rather use a feed reader, subscribe to the review’s own RSS feed. And if you follow PlanetFOSS on Mastodon or Bluesky, the review lands in your timeline as a post on Monday mornings anyway. Its link takes you straight to the matching issue.

PlanetFOSS is now on Bluesky too

Until now, PlanetFOSS was only on Mastodon when it came to social networks. Now the site also posts on Bluesky, under the handle @planetfoss.net. The account sends out every supernova about half an hour after it ignites, meaning as soon as many sources cover the same topic at once, and the weekly review on Mondays. As on Mastodon, the posts are in English and come with a link card and an image.

So your timeline doesn’t overflow, there’s a brake: at most two posts in six hours, and the same topic comes back no sooner than a week later. Bluesky marks the account as automated, and here too the texts come from fixed templates. Mastodon, Bluesky and all RSS feeds now sit together in the PlanetFOSS header under the new Follow PlanetFOSS menu.

Search with filters

Until now, the search was rather crude: it showed at most 60 results, with no way to page through them. Now you can narrow the results down to the last 7 days, the last 30 days or the last year and limit them to one section. You can sort them by best match or newest first. PlanetFOSS spreads up to 150 results across pages of 30 posts each.

This comes in handy when you only want to know what has happened lately with a topic, without digging through old news. A Wayland search over the last 30 days, for example, returns 39 results in the English view, with the newest at the top. With a section as a filter, you can also narrow things down to, say, only desktop or self-hosting news.

Hiding sources and sections

Not every source interests everyone, and if you don’t care about games, you may not want to see Steam news at all. That’s why every source and section page now has a Hide source or Hide section button, and the same switch is in the Display menu at the top right. The posts then disappear from the front page and all lists, and a short note at the top tells you how many there were.

You don’t need an account for this. PlanetFOSS only remembers your choice in your browser, without any cookie, so you’ll have to make it again on your phone. Everything you’ve hidden is listed in the solar system, where a click on show brings it back. There you’ll also find the address of a personal RSS feed that leaves out the same sources and sections.

All of this is available on planetfoss.net right now, and from now on the weekly review comes out every Monday. With hiding in particular, I’m curious what you’d like to get rid of, because your choice stays in your browser and never reaches me. What else are you missing on PlanetFOSS? Let me know in the comments or by email at info@planetfoss.net.

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But a click alone doesn’t pay any bills. Behind many sources are people who write their articles in their spare time, or small newsrooms that live on subscriptions, donations and ads. Lots of readers block the ads, though, and if you find an article through an aggregator, you usually never even see the blog’s donation page. A new link on PlanetFOSS is meant to close that gap.

A heart for the source

Starting today, blogs, magazines and publishers can add a link to their subscription or donation page on PlanetFOSS. It appears on their source page as a box of its own, “Support …”, right below the header, complete with a Support button. One click takes you straight to the site owner’s page. PlanetFOSS doesn’t sit in between and doesn’t earn a cent from it; it’s just a plain old link.

In the solar system, the directory of all sources, these sites also get a small heart. On top of that, there’s a separate Support tab that lists only the sources that have added such a link. So if you want to give something back to a blog or magazine you read regularly, you’ll find the right page there with a single click instead of having to hunt for it.

Two sources are on board from day one. GNU/Linux.ch (in German) points to its support page, and Linux und Ich got its heart as well: here the link leads to “Buy me a coffee”. Sure, putting my own blog in first has a certain aftertaste. But somebody had to try out the feature, and in my case I at least knew for sure where the link was supposed to go.

What PlanetFOSS promises publishers

PlanetFOSS already has a few fixed rules for publishers and site owners. Every card links directly to your article, with no framing and no copy. It only takes what your site itself provides for previews, and PlanetFOSS automatically honors settings like noindex or max-snippet in your meta robots tags. For publishers, the teaser is also capped at 200 characters.

Then there’s reach: on request, I’ll tell you how many readers the website sent your way in a month. Only daily totals are counted, with no data about the readers themselves. All of these promises are collected on the About PlanetFOSS page in the section “For publishers and site owners”, in case you want to read through them at your leisure or pass them on to your editorial team.

Get in touch

You run a blog, a magazine, a video channel or a publishing house that’s part of PlanetFOSS, and you have a page for subscriptions or donations, say through Steady, Patreon, Liberapay or Ko-fi? Then drop me a short email at info@planetfoss.net or leave a comment here on the blog. All I need is the address of that page; I’ll take care of the rest.

If you’re not on PlanetFOSS at all yet, you’re just as welcome to get in touch, and the same goes for anyone who would rather not be included: removal happens right away. And to you as readers: if you read a source regularly, take a look at the Support tab. Which blogs and magazines would you like to see there with a heart?

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The start page simply froze Epiphany solid. Afterwards, the journal held a core dump of the web process, and systemd had logged a memory peak of 5.8 GB. For a news site with a handful of cards, that’s a bit much in my opinion. Restarting didn’t help either: Epiphany dutifully restores the PlanetFOSS tab and promptly chokes on it again.

Following the trail

A look at the package history gave the first clue: on October 7, Arch Linux had updated WebKitGTK, the browser engine behind Epiphany, to version 2.54. The browser itself was quickly off the hook. MiniBrowser, a bare-bones test browser that ships with WebKitGTK, ballooned to several gigabytes within seconds on the PlanetFOSS start page. A plain example page, on the other hand, gets by with 170 MB.

The trail leads to the star

An AI gave me a hand with the debugging, but narrowing things down was good old process of elimination. Without JavaScript, the page still hung. Without the stylesheet, it ran just fine. After that, one style rule after another got the boot until the culprit was clear: backdrop-filter. It blurs the background behind an element and creates the popular frosted-glass look.

PlanetFOSS uses the effect in several places, but mostly on the small bookmark stars in the top left corner of every article card. The start page has 55 of them, plus eight news cards and ten play icons on the videos. Each of these elements gets its own frosted-glass layer. In those numbers, WebKitGTK 2.54 apparently buckles. Tiny star, massive impact.

To double-check, I built a test page full of cards, each with one small frosted-glass element. With ten to 14 cards, memory stayed in the green. With 18 cards, around one gigabyte was already taken, and from 22 cards on, usage shot up to seven or eight gigabytes. So things tip over somewhere around 20 layers, although the exact limit is hard to pin down.

The interesting part: the blur itself isn’t to blame at all. Frosted glass without any blur, or a simple grayscale filter, bloats WebKitGTK just the same. So the problem lies in how the new version manages these layers. Turning off the engine’s hardware acceleration does keep the test page lean. That’s no fix, though, since I can hardly tell my visitors how to launch their browser.

Firefox and Chrome couldn’t care less

That leaves the question of whether only WebKitGTK is affected. So I loaded the same copy of the start page in different browsers, once with the old and once with the new design, and measured memory usage each time. I did this on my Arch notebook and in a virtual machine running Ubuntu 26.04. Images and text were identical in every run.

The result is clear. Firefox and Chrome show practically the same usage before and after. Even Ubuntu’s older WebKitGTK 2.52 stays perfectly calm at around 680 MB. Only version 2.54 explodes: on my notebook, memory usage climbed to 9.8 GB in 40 seconds. After reworking the page, it was a mere 300 MB.

In the VM, Epiphany ran as a Flatpak, which brings the new engine along. There, the browser ballooned to 4.3 GB within a minute, until only 300 MB of the roughly 5 GB of RAM were left. In an earlier run, the tab threw in the towel entirely: Oops! Something went wrong while displaying this page. With the new design, it stayed at 721 MB.

Opaque background instead of frosted glass

The fix on the PlanetFOSS side is unspectacular. Stars, news cards, and play icons now do without frosted glass, and their background is simply a little less transparent instead. You’ll really only notice the difference if you put both versions side by side and look very closely. For a few gigabytes less memory hunger, that’s more than a fair trade in my opinion.

The change has been live for a few days, and MiniBrowser once again gets by with 213 MB on the real start page. I kept the frosted-glass effect in the pop-out section bar and on the source links in the lead story. That’s only a handful of layers, and they don’t throw WebKit off balance. linuxundich.de also uses the effect in just two places and was never affected.

All in all, the problem clearly lies in WebKitGTK 2.54 and not in my stylesheet. Presumably every page that uses enough elements with backdrop-filter is affected. So my advice to everyone who builds websites: go easy on the frosted glass and load your site in Epiphany every now and then. I’ve filed a bug report with a test case in the WebKit Bugzilla. Hopefully I didn’t kill anyone’s browser session.

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That’s exactly what PlanetFOSS is for. The site has been running in a trial phase for a few days, and starting today I’d like to launch it officially. The idea is a planet that isn’t tied to one project but collects across topics: distributions, desktops, the kernel, self-hosting, gaming, security, politics. The sources are publishers, blogs, project sites, and video channels, in German and English, and every visitor decides which language they want to see.

A magazine, not a list

Visually, PlanetFOSS takes its cue from a modern computer magazine rather than the classic Planet list. There’s a lead story, cards with an image and a teaser, categories, and a bar with the topics of the day. The site only takes what the source sites themselves provide for previews, meaning Open Graph data or the content of the RSS feed. Every card links straight to the original article. There are no full texts.

I also put some effort into privacy. The preview images are stored as WebP on PlanetFOSS’s own server, so no visitor IP ends up on third-party servers. There are no cookies, no external scripts, and no tracking. You can still mark articles with a star as worth reading, without an account: instead of a CAPTCHA, your browser solves a small computing puzzle, and the star is only remembered locally in your browser.

Under the hood, it’s good old PHP with MySQL, no framework, on ordinary shared hosting. Every five minutes, a cron job kicks off a cycle: fetch feeds, enrich new articles, sort them, rebuild the front pages. The real work, though, isn’t the fetching but the sorting. A site with more than a hundred sources quickly turns into a wall of text when ten sites report on the same thing.

Same news, one bundle

When a new Firefox version comes out, it feels like everyone writes about it. On a regular Planet site, you’d see Firefox ten times in a row. That’s why PlanetFOSS compares every new article with all articles from other sources published in the last 48 hours. If the title contains the same topic with the same version number, say “Firefox 158” or “Ubuntu 26.10”, the articles end up in a shared bundle, even across the language barrier.

There are two more signals. If two news items link to the same primary source, such as the release notes or a press release, they very likely belong together. Run-of-the-mill targets like GitHub or Wikipedia don’t count. As a last resort, the aggregator compares the titles themselves: stop words get thrown out, and if half of the remaining words match and the titles share a topic, it’s a bundle.

The motto here: better to bundle too little than to bundle wrong. A missing “also at” hardly anyone notices, but two unrelated stories lumped together stand out right away. On the front page, bundles with two sources appear as a card with a source bar underneath. From three sources on, it becomes a story card that’s twice as wide in the grid and lists every additional report with its own headline and its own link to the original.

New topics without a dictionary

PlanetFOSS has a dictionary with terms like GNOME, Plasma, Proxmox, or Steam. It helps with the categories, which a small Naive Bayes classifier also assigns, and with version topics. The thing is, the open source world keeps coming up with new names that aren’t in any dictionary. During the first tests, I noticed ArtCraft, for example: seven articles about a new project, and the site hadn’t picked up on any of it.

Since then, PlanetFOSS looks for new names on its own. A candidate has to appear in the titles of at least three sources within the last 48 hours (four if only one language is involved), but no more than once in the four weeks before. Then there’s a little trick: a name is never written in lowercase. That filters out words like “released” or the German “Sicherheitslücke” (security hole) without endless stop word lists. Whatever is left becomes a new topic.

Comets and supernovas

Now it gets interesting. The name sets the scene: when a topic suddenly gets a flood of coverage, say on the release day of a new Ubuntu version, it becomes a supernova, a sudden, very bright outburst. A topic that’s only just picking up speed is a comet. And once the outburst is over, there’s still an afterglow for a while.

A comet appears as soon as at least three different sources write about a topic within twelve hours. Its cards get a badge, and it moves to the front of the topic bar. So that general catch-all topics like the Linux kernel don’t become permanent comets, they also need twice as many sources as usual. If a comet can’t keep up the momentum, it drops back to a normal topic.

A supernova needs more. Four sources have to report within 24 hours, almost all of them in the last twelve hours. The topic has to be broad, meaning it reaches at least two types of sources (publisher, blog, project, video) or shows up in both languages. On top of that, it needs at least three times as many sources as its average over the last four weeks. Otherwise, every week with some Ubuntu news would be a supernova.

PlanetFOSS knows some things in advance. A release calendar holds the known dates for Ubuntu, GNOME, KDE Plasma, Fedora, Debian, the kernel, and Firefox. If a topic falls within that window, one source fewer is enough to ignite. At the same time, no more than two supernovas may burn at once, so the front page doesn’t drown in nonstop fireworks. If there are more candidates, the strongest ignite and the rest stay comets for the time being.

A supernova burns for at least twelve hours. After that, it cools down once nothing new arrives for six hours or the number of sources drops below half of its peak. If a second wave comes along, such as the first reviews a few days after a release, it can ignite again. After 72 hours, the topic goes to the archive, but its topic page stays online and keeps collecting later posts.

How the front page comes together

When a supernova is burning, it gets its own band at the very top above the lead story, showing the number of posts and sources and a row of cards, sorted by official announcements, news, reviews, how-tos, and videos. Whatever is in that band doesn’t show up again further down. On top of that, PlanetFOSS sends a post to the @planetfoss account on Mastodon half an hour after a supernova ignites.

For everything else, the site hands out points. The score takes into account the size of the bundle, the stars from visitors, an active supernova topic, and the weight of the source. All of that is divided by the age of the article, so older posts gradually slide down. Stories that many sources cover stay up longer, but not forever.

For the lead story, importance beats freshness, but the candidates come from the last 24 hours and preferably bring a large image. The age of a bundle is the age of its second-newest report: if more sources keep writing, it stays up front, but a single latecomer isn’t enough. If a post has already been the lead for more than eight hours, it loses half of its points, and after 14 hours three quarters.

To keep one busy source from filling the whole page, the selection also looks for variety. In the lead story and the top stories next to it, every post comes from a different source, and the “Latest” section shows at most two articles from the same site. That way, smaller blogs get their spot next to the big publishers, and the front page looks a little different every time you visit.

Statistics instead of AI

By the way, there’s no AI in PlanetFOSS that summarizes texts or guesses topics. Everything runs on counting, comparing, and a handful of thresholds. In my opinion, that’s actually the better way: it costs nothing, sends no data anywhere, and stays traceable. When a supernova ignites, you can say exactly why. That said, I did build the site myself with AI assistance.

Of course, it didn’t work without some fine-tuning. Early on, for example, a supernova ignited for Microsoft Defender, even though the four news items were spread over 18 hours. Since then, an outburst has to be genuinely fresh. Ubuntu 26.10 also ignited two hours late on its release day at first, because it was measured against all Ubuntu news. That’s why version topics now get their own baseline.

I keep an eye on cases like these, and for that the site saves a snapshot of topics, bundles, and lead stories every six hours. So the logic will surely keep changing. A wrong bundle or a comet that shouldn’t be one can be corrected by hand in the admin area. The algorithm dutifully respects those corrections on its next run.

Just head over to planetfoss.net and tell me what you think. Which sources are you still missing, and which blogs, magazines, or other publications from the German- or English-speaking Linux and open source world absolutely belong on the planet? I’m happy to take suggestions in the comments. And if you run a blog yourself and would rather not be included, the site of course also offers a way to opt out.

Update: Why the stars on PlanetFOSS no longer use frosted glass, and what that has to do with a memory leak in WebKitGTK, is covered in WebKitGTK 2.54: Tiny Star, Massive Memory Leak.

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Thanks for reading Linux und Ich. If you enjoy the blog and would like to support my work, you will find more information on the donation page.