Technology Tales

And then there was one...

25^th August 2025

Even with the rise of the internet, magazine publishing was in rude health at the end of the last century. That persisted through the first decade of this century before any decline began to be noticed. Now, things are a poor shadow of what once used to be.

Though a niche area with some added interest, Linux magazine publishing has not been able to escape this trend. At the height of the flourish, we had the launch of Linux Voice by former writers of Linux Format. That only continues as a section in Linux Magazine these days, one of the first casualties from a general decline in readership.

Next, it was the turn of Linux User & Developer. This came into the hands of Future when they acquired Imagine Publishing and remained in print for a time after that due to the conditions of the deal set by the competition regulator. Once beyond that, Future closed it to stick with its own more lightweight title, Linux Format, transferring some of the writers across to the latter. This echoed what they did with Web Designer; they closed that in favour of .Net.

In both cases, dispatching the in-house publications might have been a better idea; without content, you cannot have readers. In time, .Net met its demise and the same fate awaited Linux Format a few months ago after it celebrated its silver jubilee. There was no goodbye edition this time: it went out with a bang, reminding us of glory days that have passed. The content was becoming more diverse with hardware features getting included, perhaps reflecting that something else was happening behind the scenes.

After all that, Linux Magazine soldiers on to outlive the others. It perhaps helps that it is published by an operation centred around the title, Linux New Media, which also publishes Admin Magazine. Even so, it too has needed to trim things a bit. For a time, there was a dedicated Raspberry Pi title that lives on as a section in Linux Magazine.

It was while sprucing up some of the content on here that I was reminded of the changes. Where do you find surveys of what is available? The options could include desktop environments and Linux distributions as much as code editors, web browsers and other kinds of software. While it is true that operations like Future have portals for exactly this kind of thing, they too have a nemesis in the form of GenAI. Asking ChatGPT may be their undoing as much as web publishing triggered a decline in magazine publishing.

Technology upheaval means destruction as much as creation, and there are occasions when spending quiet time reading a paper periodical is just what you need. We all need time away from screen reading, whatever the device happens to be.