These posts always fill me with strange mixed feelings.
As someone who grew up in the country without even access to a library, the monthly computer mag was my only source of info and my escape from the world I was in. So there certainly is a good deal of positive nostalgia and sadness.
On the other hand it feels kind of outlandish that some of these magazines survived until this day. The last time I bought a mag was probably more than a quarter of a century ago
feelings-vomit incoming:
i grew up obsessed with the idea of magazines in general. some of my favorites included EGM, MacAddict (especially the first few years - i'd probably think the "attitude" annoying nowadays but younger me LOVED it), 2600 (still subscribed) and so many more i've forgotten over the years. almost every magazine i cared about is gone now except 2600, which survives i think mainly as a labor of love but maybe the editor team still makes a living from it.
to me, a magazine represents something more than just the raw content - others have mentioned the benefit of being exposed to more topics than you might have initially been interested in (i know i learned a lot more about storage technologies from linux magazines as a kid who never had access to fancy RAID/SAS hardware than i otherwise would have). there's also something nice about a publication with a variety of authors that are all wrangled together under a good editorial team that makes everything feel so much more cohesive than a lot of team-published blogs/online things. i also always really enjoyed the physicality of magazines, from displaying years-long collections to the idea of just pulling an old issue off the shelf to revisit a time in the past. blogs etc just don't do anything for me - i find a lot of what i read online just leaks out of my brain compared to printed publications. layouts - what a herculean effort even in the days of QuarkXpress! a blog with a nice stylesheet just doesn't compare, personally.
i'm glad that there's still a fairly vibrant zine community out there but as a rule, they're often one-person labors of love. even the venerable Maximum Rocknroll went digital-only because of the cost and effort required to wrangle articles from submissions all over the world.
if i may... everybody, go subscribe to 2600 right now. it's not expensive, and the quality varies, but that's because it's all user submissions - write your own articles! it's really one of the only fully-independent tech publications that still exists and it's truly the treasure of a scene that's changed wildly since it's inception.
I have an extra reason to be sad about this, as a writer who had at least one article published in _Linux Format_ (“Julia: Learn the New Language for Scientific Computing”, back in 2019: https://linuxformat.com/archives?issue=246). It’s another reduction in the size of the reasonably-paying market for long pieces with technical content.
Linux Format shipping Mandrake Linux was how I first got into Linux, 25 years is impressive for a magazine with such a little niche audience.
Any (niche) print magazines anyone would recommend? Seems kind of fun to get something in the mail every month.
This makes me so sad. I wrote a number of articles for them when Nick Veitch was editor. They paid well and respected my copy.
I got the Linux Answers “trial” magazine and then subscribed to Linux Format for ~20 years. Sorry to see it go :-(
Oh, I had quite a few of those.
Yeah most newstands are quite a sad picture from technical magazines versus 30 - 40 years ago.
I have quite a decent collection of these and only cancelled my subscription about a year ago. I just didn't read them as much as I once did and couldn't justify the cost. I did love them when I did read them though.
No amount of LF articles could help me set up Nagios correctly.
RIP. I suspect there are some copies in a stack somewhere in my possession. I really enjoyed wondering which software I would learn about each month.
These were significantly more cool when internet access was rare
> if people wanted magazines on topics they care about ... they’d buy ’em.
I do wonder if this is entirely true. Some print magazines I would have liked to subscribe to made it unpalatable in one way or another (dubious cancellation mechanisms etc.)
I looked at subscribing to several magazines within the last few months. One had no explicit cancellation mechanism, one would have been delivered to a courier office several miles away and this one was no longer accepting subscriptions.
I'm sure it's hard to make this work - but perhaps there are self-inflicted speedbumps here as well?