• annoyed-onion@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Used to buy these religiously every month about 15 years ago. They used to come with distros on a disc and I had pretty rubbish internet at the time so they were pretty handy for distro hopping.

    They also did a really great podcast at that time too!

    Glad to see they’re still going!

    • MudMan@fedia.io
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      2 months ago

      Those were so relevant at the time. Especially when installers started getting smooth and streamlined it made things so accessible. Arguably more than now, where every distro needs you to download an iso and use some third party software to make a bootable external drive on some device that already works, then manually boot into it.

      Back then you’d just buy a magazine at the shop, pop that CD in and your PC was up and running, which was a process every Windows user was familiar with anyway.

      I remember running down to the nearest store to see if I could find a live CD on a magazine cover being a non-trivial troubleshooting option there for a while when you were trying to fix some computer that wouldn’t boot but you needed to rescue some files stat.

      • annoyed-onion@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        For sure, and even on my own computers, the amount of times I used one of their Ubuntu isos to fix my broken grub was non zero! 😅

      • Richard@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        You don’t need any third-party software to create a bootable USB. On any Unix-like, you can simply write to the flash drive per-byte with the dd core utility.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    They are advertising Brave as a safe alternative in June 2025? Maybe it was fine for print to die.

    I’ll be honest, I thought this cover was from sometime in the early 2000s. Once you format the subjects anachronistically you realize just how long the highlights in the Linux community have been the same. Live USB, easy dual boot and Ubuntu “blasting off”. That takes me back.

  • thehatfox@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I used to read them, they often had good in depth tutorials. The Format branding has been going for a long time, I can remember reading Amiga Format.

    There were a few other Linux magazines as well, Linux User, Linux Magazine, Linux Voice. I think there’s still a Raspberry Pi magazine as well which covers a lot of Linux stuff.