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LinuxJournal, Which Ceased Publication Last Month Citing Poor Financial Condition, Secures Fresh Fund From Readers To Resume Operation (linuxjournal.com)
New submitter dataknife2 writes: LinuxJournal announced in Nov 2017 that they were going to cease publication; With some timely intervention by Private Internet Access they are going to be able to continue operation and are currently soliciting feedback for improving the magazine in the future. In a blog post, team at LinuxJournal wrote: Talk about a Happy New Year. The reason: it turns out we're not dead. In fact, we're more alive than ever, thanks to a rescue by readers -- specifically, by the hackers who run Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN, a London Trust Media company. PIA are avid supporters of freenode and the larger FOSS community. They're also all about Linux and the rest of the modern portfolio of allied concerns: privacy, crypto, freedom, personal agency, rewriting the rules of business and government around all of those, and having fun with constructive hacking of all kinds. We couldn't have asked for a better rescue ship to come along for us. In addition, they aren't merely rescuing this ship we were ready to scuttle; they're making it seaworthy again and are committed to making it bigger and better than we were ever in a position to think about during our entirely self-funded past.
While this funding may allow the publication to continue for a bit longer, I don't see how they're addressing the much more serious problem: many long-time and serious Linux users are abandoning Linux, while Linux is attracting very few new users.
Obviously, there won't be long-term demand for a magazine when the audience it caters to is shrinking, or at best it just isn't growing at all.
Of course, this magazine can't really influence why so many of us experienced Linux users are abandoning Linux.
They can't do much to get rid of systemd, which has caused reliability issues for many of us, which in turn renders Linux unusable for servers and other serious usage scenarios.
They can't do much to deal with non-systemd Linux distros like Devuan being amateurish, or like Slackware being too archaic, or Gentoo requiring too much hand-holding to use productively.
They can't do much to get rid of GNOME 3, which has ruined Linux as a workstation OS.
They can't do much to fix KDE, which has become bloated, slow and awkward to use.
They can't do much to get rid of PulseAudio, which has wasted so much of our time.
They can't do anything to address how OSes like Windows and macOS have become far more stable and usable than Linux.
And don't even bother bringing up Android. Android shouldn't be considered Linux, even if the Linux kernel is present, because the kernel is so deeply hidden away from users and app developers.
I can't see how this magazine will hope to survive as more and more Linux users are moving to OSes like FreeBSD, macOS, and even Windows.