Welcome to FOSS Outpost!

M.Hanny Sabbagh

Very happy to welcome all of you here in this newly-created forum!

I am Hanny, founder of FOSS Post. We have had many other contributors publish content at FOSS Post over the years, but most of the content and all of the administrative work is handled by me.

General Introduction

There are zillion forums out there about Linux and open source software, and this is not simply yet another one of these.

Instead, FOSS Outpost is a place for power users where they can have high-level discussions about general issues related to Linux and open source software, or even get general insights and directions about developing open source software.

In other words, it is a place for exchanging intellectual insights and opinions about anything related to the open source world, away from support requests or very rabit-holed technical debates.

The climate we aim to create here is a friendly, respectful and professional discussion climate so that perhaps fruitful thoughts or initiatives can be born out of this place. This is why we say it is aimed at power users: It is not just discussion for the sake of discussion, but also to exchange expertise and perhaps even develop something together.

On this forum, you can:

Discuss any published article on our website in detail.
Discuss any general issue related to Linux or open source software.
Ask for our expertise in the fields we are capable of to help you out in something.
Read some of our internal stories on how FOSS Post is currently working.
Enjoy exclusive content which is published here and not on the main site.

We are going to publish TONS of content in this forum. 😄

There are a lot of support forums related to Linux and open source software, so publishing support requests here is quite discouraged. The only exception to this would be support requests related to following a tutorial/article we published on the FOSS Post. In that case, you are very much welcome to ask for help about it.

Why Should You Participate?

It is my hope that we can create a much friendlier discussion environment here than other Linux and open source forums out there. Additionally, with support requests away from this forum and the focus on Linux desktop and high-level open source software and components, this forum should be much more fun to spend time on than other forums.

Discussions are categorized into interesting tags that you can see from the sidebar of the main page. We designed this categorization carefully so that it can depict the topics we are interested in having on this forum.

Furthermore, unlike other social media sites where a random moderator can control the entire group for whatever reason, this forum is managed exclusively by the team at FOSS Post, who have been delivering you high-quality news, articles and even software for Linux for many years (since 2016). With our deep experience in these topics present here, discussions are perhaps more fruitful than in other places.

This forum was made using the Flarum script; unlike many other forums, we opted for Flarum because of how lightweight and modern it was. Flarum is an open source forum software written in PHP. So that’s also another change from traditional Linux forums 😊

Finally, the one of the biggest features of this forum is what you’ll see in next section 😉

Your Content is Yours (GDPR)

We don’t want to lock you in our forums. When you create content, then that content is yours to keep. Even in the very unlikely event that we run into disagreements and your account gets suspended for some reason, your content is still yours to download and keep!

Using one of the features of our forums, you can always export ALL OF YOUR CONTENT and all of your personal data recorded on our forums into a single downloadable archive from your settings page:

Once you download it, you’ll see that all of your content and data are contained in separate folders which have everything we had about you:

In this way, you can guarantee that your hard work is never locked with someone else. 😎

This also makes our forum website, by definition, compatible with GDPR regulations in the EU.

Compare that with some random social media group or forum where anyone can ban you and all of your content is lost. Or with another Linux forum which is not compatible with GDPR and doesn’t let you download a copy of your content and data… We are all good here. 😅

Code of Conduct

Our general code of conduct can be summarized in the following points:

Be respectful and friendly with every member of this forum.
Never direct insults towards anyone. Doing so can result in a ban.
Don’t include links to other sites and blogs unless it is needed in the discussion. We don’t like spam and we know some people may simply want to promote a link or two. We may take action depending on each spamming case.
English is the universal communication language for the world at this moment. Don’t use another language here.
You are very much welcome to have your own opinions about any Linux or open source project, but while delivering your opinion, remember to be respectful and never target the individuals behind it.
Don’t try to doxx any member of this forum in any way.
No posts or comments about politics, religions or any topic outside Linux and OSS.
Avoid creating drama.
Remember the human.

By participating in this forum you agree to this code of conduct. Additionally, you grant FOSS Post a non-exclusive, permanent, irrevocable, unlimited license to use, publish, or re-publish your content in connection with the service. You still retain copyright over the content you create.

These terms may be changed at any time without notice.

About FOSS Post

FOSS Post started as an online magazine about Linux and open source software. We publish reviews, analysis, news, tutorials and opinion pieces about various issues in the open source world. Mostly, we target the Linux desktop landscape, and prefer to talk about high-level products that matter to the end-user.

We aim to have all of our articles and discussions supported by scientific, sound and clear sources so that a mostly correct course of action can be selected by the reader.

We also aim to be different from other FOSS-related websites in that we don’t want to publish “consumerist” content that only generates clicks and views. Instead, FOSS Post is meant to be an independent publication by humans, for humans.

Our website is always available at: https://fosspost.org
The privacy policy for both this forum and the main site is at: https://fosspost.org/privacy-policy/
Our mailing list can be accessed from Substack: https://fosspost.substack.com
You can also join our Patreon campaign to get some perks and support our efforts: https://patreon.com/fosspost

Inquiries and questions can be sent to our main email address: contact[at]fosspost[dot]org.

We are also continuously improving this forum and adding new functionality each day, so don’t be surprised if you see some surprise changes 😎

Again, very happy to welcome all of you here.

You can introduce yourselves in this thread, and let us know more about you.

M.Hanny Sabbagh

Let me start by introducing myself!

I am Muhammed Hanny Sabbagh, founder of FOSS Post. I have B.Sc and M.Sc degrees in computer science and engineering. I develop software in Python/Flask, and have a lot of interest in topics related to content creation, automation, privacy & security, vehicular networking, decentralized applications, and of course Linux & open source software.

My master degree research topic was about privacy in vehicular networking. You can access my M.Sc thesis here.

I have been using Linux since I was 12 years old. I even released my own Linux distribution called “Hilal Linux” when I was 13 to the world. It was a custom Ubuntu-based distribution suited for Arabic and Muslim users. It was active from 2011 to 2014, when I had to sunset the project to focus on my final year of high school 🤭

The project received recognition in Softpedia, SourceForge and other sites. The distribution was downloaded over +100K times in these very short years.

My second “big project” was Green Recorder; an open source screen recorder mainly aimed for Wayland. In fact, it was the first Wayland screen recorder in the market. It also still supported X.org based desktops as well. I wrote it using Python/GTK3 and used ffmpeg for screen recording. I had to sunset the project in 2019 for the lack of contributions.

My third “big project” was FOSS Post, where I simply wanted to move into content creation in English about open source software, and talk about aspects no one talked about before. The project started in 2016 and is thankfully still going strong as you can see until this very day 😃

You can view my GitHub profile here: https://github.com/mhsabbagh/

So that’s all about me, I guess. Hope to hear from more people here soon 😄

hmza

M.Hanny Sabbagh Welcome

rachele arlean

Thank you!

newguy

Thanks a lot for your work, and for solving the email issue I told you 😄