Linux Magazines

A while back, I was a subscriber to the Linux Journal. It was mainly because when I started the subscription, Linux Journal was the only Linux magazine around. I stop subscribing a while back, but now I want to subscribe to a Linux magazine again (my only other magazine subscription is to Wired). Now there are a few Linux magazines on the market. I test drove three of them.

• Linux Journal: The original Linux magazine is still around and still putting out good issues. Each issue focuses on an in-depth subject -- this month it is Linux security. With this kind of focus, a subscription to Linux Journal is kind of hit or miss each month. Either the subject hits home for you, or the subject has no significance.
• Linux Magazine: I really wanted to like this magazine, but the articles in it were very fluffy. There was not much substance to the magazine. There were a lot of words on the page, but nothing said. The review of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 could have been reduced to three paragraphs. The article on Linux in IBM read like a puff piece. And the exploration of Microsoft Windows Vista, like the RHEL5 article, could have been reduced to a few paragraphs. Fluffy, fluffy.
• Linux Magazine Pro: First off, this magazine is damned expensive ($10 an issue??). The articles are somewhere in between Linux Journal and Linux Magazine. Each issue has a focus like Linux Journal does. The articles do seem to veer more towards fluff than substance -- and at the cost of a subscription (a nickel below $100), it should really have more substance. Sure, each issue comes with a pressed DVD of some Linux distro, but I can download the distro for free and get it faster than waiting for the magazine to arrive.