Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
To what extent do Linux magazines represent Linux users?
Author: Seth Gordon Posted: 10/19/1999; 10:33:26 AM Topic: Today's scriptingNews Outline Msg #: 12169 (In response to 12154) Prev/Next: 12168 / 12170
I picked up an issue of the Linux Journal a few months ago. The articles there were well-written and interesting, but they weren't interesting enough, and weren't relevant enough to my immediate needs, to convince me to subscribe.A lot of other Linux users must feel the same way about LJ. It's a good magazine -- but there are so many ways to use Linux (as a platform for learning how to hack Unix, as a way to make an old PC useful, as a Web server, as a database server, as a router, as part of a Beowulf cluster for scientific computing, as an embedded system, etc.) that any one Linux magazine could only appeal to a fraction of Linux users.
Compared with the total (estimated) number of Linux users out there, how many people read LJ? How does that proportion compare with, say, the major Mac-related glossy magazines? How many readers are actually paying their own money for LJ, instead of putting it on some company's expense account or library budget?
As for Slashdot ... read Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism". There are, in Orwell's terminology, "positive nationalists" for Linux, and "negative nationalists" against Microsoft, and a lot of them post to Slashdot. They are displaying a general weakness in human nature, not a special weakness in the Linux development community.
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