
Some news from LWN - gghh
http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/
======
mherdeg
There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article or on the
web page that hosts it
([http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/](http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/)).

I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden --
[https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info](https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info) which says
"Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an
account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which
seems like a lot of steps to pay them money.

~~~
kentonv
Another problem is that when you subscribe, you choose a number of months for
your subscription to last. The maximum you can choose in 24. I just now
discovered that my subscription had lapsed. If I had the option to subscribe
permanently, I would choose to do so.

I assume this is some sort of principled stand designed to avoid skimming
money from people who no longer use their subscriptions but are too lazy to
cancel... but it probably means LWN is failing to accept money from a lot of
people who would be very happy to be paying.

~~~
mwcremer
An annuity may be preferable to lump sum. And I receive several courteous
reminders to renew before my subscription runs out.

------
gluegadget
I'm a subscriber but I don't look at it as a subscription to a weekly magazine
but an investment. Enabling knowledgeable people to write in-depth analysis of
various patch sets or subsystems of Linux kernel—which rarely change
dramatically—ensures that, later on, there'll always be an article in Google
search results that'll explain the reason behind certain behaviours in a more
approachable manner than reading the source code or doc.txts—they're
invaluable but a bit intimidating.

~~~
karma_vaccum123
I felt the same way and subscribed for years, but lately most of the content
seems to be links out to external sites, and many of those seem to be reposts
from HN or proggit....just not worth it anymore to me

~~~
Analemma_
I don't see the behavior you describe. A lot of the content _references_
external sites, to provide additional information and context, but that's a
good thing: it means more people in more places are having knowledgeable
discussions that are worth referring to. I don't think it has turned LWN into
a content-free link farm.

Don't be afraid of hyperlinking; it's the reason the Web was created, after
all.

~~~
karma_vaccum123
I'm not afraid of hyperlinking, but I don't need to pay for it either.

------
AsyncAwait
So I see a lot of confusion about what LWN is on here. While it provides a
detailed write up of recent kernel development for sure, it is far from the
only thing they do. LWN is first and foremost a great way to stay on top of
the most important developments in the free/open-source community, without
having to browse tens of mailing list discussions on a weekly basis. I see it
as giving me a way to keep a tap on the pulse of the community and thus be
ready when changes come. They have reports from every FOSS conference or
hackaton and condense the main points into a very readable summary that saves
me time, while still keeping me informed.

Apart from kernel development, it did excellent technical reporting on
systemd, prior to it being widely adopted and it does a great job of keeping
you in the know of how things like wayland are actually progressing.

As for the parts that are genuinely over my head, I've been surprised how many
times I've read about something on LWN and not really understanding what I was
reading about at the time, but connecting the dots later.

You know when you read something and have no use for it, so you delete it from
your front-end memory, but it resurfaces just when you actually need it?

Just to give an example, I remember reading a series on LWN some time ago
about how virtual memory is managed in the kernel and now that I am writing a
toy OS in Rust, I regularly have flashbacks to that series and it makes the
concepts that I am learning about now genuinely easier to grasp, because I can
make an instant, be it clouded connection that I did in fact hear about this
and this already, even if it didn't make a lot of sense at the time.

There's also been times when the kernel has been misbehaving on me and I
remembered that there was an article on LWN talking about this very issue and
how adding a certain kernel boot parameter may resolve it, and it usually
does.

For me, LWN is well worth the $7 a month they ask for it just on these points
alone, it is one of a very few internet publications that in fact I am willing
to pay for and consider it money well spent.

~~~
davidgerard
And many of the actual kernel devs, and other important and notable FOSS
coders, as regulars in the comments.

"LWN: A site you want to read the comments on."

~~~
karma_vaccum123
That may have been true once, but imho these days LWN is as likely to have
uninformed or trollish comments as anywhere else...you don't need to pay to
comment

~~~
nickez
You can hide comments from nonpaying users, I do that and it removes all the
noise.

~~~
rleigh
If only it was the nonpaying users which were the bigger problem. There's a
small number of loud and obnoxious subscribers who drown out most conversation
threads and make reading or contributing not worth the effort. It used to be a
place for some keen and insightful commentary. But in recent years I've found
the various "factions" which dominate the discussions to make the atmosphere
quite unpleasant; it certainly pushed me out.

------
filereaper
Most people here are commenting about the look and feel of LWN, I really don't
have any complaints about the UI/UX so far, I don't expect to read LWN on my
mobile phone.

I think the main reason of the drop in readership is firstly kernel
development is very involved and detailed, LWN mostly reflects the kernel
mailing list and associated events and tech talks.

I guess what I find most difficult as an outsider of the kernel community, is
trying to keep up. Jonathan Corbet is doing and extraordinary job summarizing
the activities of the kernel community in LWN. But the kernel doesn't maintain
any main "Epics" that we have in software traditional development, so take for
example fair scheduling. AFAIK, the kernel community does not decide to tackle
fair scheduling on the next release of kernel, ie 4.7. Then say power
management in 4.8 etc...

LWN ends up with a smattering of various articles under common themes like
"Kernel", "Security" etc...

LWN has in the past explained long running topics like scheduling when key
updates are happening and I commend them for that.

None of the above is a negative reflection on the kernel community or LWN in
how they operate but it feels kinda hard to keep up and stay vested.

Anyways just a few thoughts, will renew membership now.

~~~
DiabloD3
Not all software uses epics. I've actually found epics personally to be a bit
of an antipattern, but that's a conversation for another time.

If the kernel has anything like an epic, there is multiple concurrent epics
because the Linux is not a monolithic project. Nor are epics related to any
kernel version.

For example, each major GPU driver (radeon, novaeu, intel) manages their own
development, and push things upstream. DRM (the kernel part of DRI) interacts
with those guys, and DRM pushes things upstream.

Network drivers and the network core are managed by small teams, push things
to each other (such as adding support for major intrusive features like, say,
when they added segment offload support, or recently genericfied the interface
for that to support more protocols; or alternatively, when they started making
more complex DMA patterns like scatter-gather and other zero-copy
methodologies happen). The network guys push things to each other, and push
things upstream.

The storage guys also do that, storage drivers and storage core push things to
each other, and push things upstream.

Every possible major section of the kernel is a project in of itself, and have
project leaders, and have parts that are ran by different people.

Generally, you don't push a patch to lkml by itself, and then you're done;
this almost never happens. What happens more often is you go to one of the
people who manage that part of the kernel, or has significant experience with
that part of the kernel, and discuss your patch with them, and then they will
try to help you make a patch that can be merged upstream.

More patches are rejected than committed because of how this works. Linus, or
any other kernel maintainer, does not want your patch if it hasn't been ok'ed
by the people who maintain those other parts of the kernel unless it is a
small patch that does something obviously useful.

And what about the companies that just push drivers? Companies employ kernel
hackers that know how to write drivers. For example, Intel employs the Intel
GPU driver guys, Radeon employs the Radeon GPU guys, and all those guys are
_already_ major authors in the X/DRI/Gallium/DRM/whatever community; the
infrastructure to make that all work is shaped by the hardware, the hardware
is not shaped by the infrastructure.

------
ajdlinux
As a kernel developer, I really, _really_ appreciate the work of Jon Corbet
and the rest of the LWN team. LWN serves a vital function for the kernel
community and churns out some very useful kernel articles, as well as being a
decent source of news for many other open source happenings. I hope they find
some extra revenue from somewhere!

------
grabcocque
I stopped subscribing.

The thing is, the Glory Days when kernel development was a scary, exciting
wild west are lone gone.

By necessity, the Linux kernel is now a part of the tech firmament and
development is necessarily not as _sexy_ as it used to be. So it's gonna be
tough to get people to pay to read about it.

~~~
CrLf
I don't think kernel development is any less scary now than it used to be.
It's just as scary, people just don't care to know the gory details anymore.
Such systems-level knowledge is seen as much less valuable now in the age of
javascript frameworks that don't last longer than a month and silver bullets
that everyone talks about but few are actually using for "production"
scenarios worthy of that name.

It just mirrors internet culture as a whole. Easy to consume information, show
off and fashion.

~~~
fdsaaf
> systems-level knowledge is seen as much less valuable now

Lest aspiring systems programmers get the wrong idea: systems knowledge is
still black magic and it's still _plenty_ valuable. Knowing how systems
actually work under the hood is a rare skill and can help you code circles
around the node-is-close-to-the-metal [1] competition even when writing
application code.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/234856345579446272](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/234856345579446272)

------
bflesch
I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real
target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux
for around 15 years.

I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the
total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the
content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to
enhance the site's UX at all. If you look at the mobile site, they have some
sort of dropdown to show the menu, which is then also way too small to
properly click on. Issues like this are allover the site: Tables without any
proper spacing / borders, mixing centered and left-aligned content with no
reason, etc.

For me it just feels clunky and even though the information they aggregate
seems to have some value for others, the presentation is just way off.

~~~
wtbob
> I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the
> total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume
> the content (spacing, choice of font).

Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN,
because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the
styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links,
lynx, elinks, ewww, emacs-w3m, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer,
Edge — if that's not professional, then what is?

The HTML is very clean and readable. They do use CSS.

Granted, it doesn't look trendy. Indeed, it looks like something from the
90s/00s. But once one updates to a20`6 style, one then has to spend money in
2017, 2018, spring 2019, summer 2019, fall 2019, winter 2019, January 2020,
February 2020 — one will be paying designers and artists until the end of
time.

Would I appreciate a somewhat more current look? Sure. Would I trade good HTML
and universal readability for a more current look? Hell no.

~~~
Svenskunganka
You don't really have to make it look "current" to make it better. I think a
good example is antirez blog:
[http://antirez.com/latest/0](http://antirez.com/latest/0)

It's clean, very simple and renders fine in everything, even mobile. No
distracting content, proper font and font spacing.

~~~
josteink
And has terrible contrast on the main page content's text making it hard to
read if you have poor eyesight, poor light conditions or a poor monitor.

This would probably fail a basic Universal Accessibility test based on that
alone.

~~~
sp332
I don't like low-contrast sites, but on my monitor that one is stark black-
and-white. In fact there are no CSS rules for the color, and the font stack is
"Inconsolata, Courier" so I don't know what the issue could be.

------
ersii
I really like LWN and I subscribe - although the Kernel Development part is
usually way above my head and my interest level.

If you perhaps not enjoy LWN enough to subscribe - at least consider if you
have any friends that might be interested or persuade them to subscribe - if
they're already readers.

~~~
bkor
It is important to have good quality and well researched articles. LWN
provides this for free software (so not just the kernel). As long as LWN
continues their reporting in this way (high quality), I'll continue my
subscription (more like a donation; don't need to get anything back for
myself).

Well researched information is an important way to avoid incorrect assumptions
to spread. Thereby hopefully avoiding bad decisions to be taken, as well as
actions on problematic things (e.g. gmane).

------
allendoerfer
Okay, let's fix this, here are some suggestions they could think about:

\- Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old
subscribers.

\- Improve the conversion rate. There is a middle ground between newsletter
modals and burying the method to subscribe.

\- Introduce a few new products. As far as I can see, at the moment it is just
"in depth news for OSS, especially kernel hackers". Maybe they could package
some parts of this up for different audiences (security notices, content
partnerships etc.).

\- Some marketing tactics. "Invite a new subscriber to get this badge." SEO
could be improved, too.

~~~
rilut
> \- Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old
> subscribers.

I simply tried to change the font-family to Segoe UI (or whatever your OS'
font) in Developer Tools, and it looks more interesting than Times New Roman

~~~
allendoerfer
I think they should improve the general information architecture. Make content
more discoverable. Categories, tags, overview pages, or just a better layout
of the home page, which is not only date-based.

Essentially increasing the visitor time for new visitors, then increasing the
recurring visitors, then increasing the sign ups.

------
seesomesense
LWN is one of the finest resources on Linux.

I cannot read the kernel source code as easily as the great articles on LWN
that lovingly explicate the details. Sometimes even the articles are
challenging for me but I learn something new every time I visit it.

If HN and the now nearly defunct Slashdot are popcorn, LWN is fine organically
grown fruit and vegetables.

I am off to subscribe to LWN and urge you to do so if you find the kernel
interesting

They also cover lots of non kernel topics. There was a fine article on the
software modifications usef by VW to cheat the pollution testing, for
instance.

------
mihok
I'm somewhat a new reader in the past couple years to LWN and actually was
thinking about subscribing just a couple weeks ago. In honesty, I didn't even
realize LWN had subscriptions until recently.

Either way, I've gone ahead and paid for the year up front, please keep going,
I thoroughly enjoy the articles!

------
Shugyousha
I have been a subscriber for a while now and I consider it some of the best
money I have spent ever. Just look at the wealth of information available at

[http://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/](http://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/)

that is being enabled by your subscription!

------
mplewis
I've never been inclined to subscribe to LWN, even though I read about an
article a month when it's posted to HN. Looking through the frontpage, I see:

* 6 x LWN.net Weekly Edition for $DATE

* A few weekly security advisories

* "Some news from LWN"

* Statistics from the 4.7 development cycle

* New software releases

None of these interest me. Here's what does:

* Klitzke: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL

* Python's os.urandom() in the absence of entropy

* One-time passwords and GnuPG with Nitrokey

There are a few articles I like there. But they aren't discoverable and I
can't find what I want without working to filter the noise.

Contrast this with hackaday.com, where every article is a really interesting
feature, there's no news on bugfix releases or kernel changelogs, and they mix
feature news, cool stuff in the store, and community projects.

~~~
zlynx
You didn't click into the Weekly Editions? That's where the real good stuff
is. And it is separated into categories so you can skip the kernel news page
if you like.

------
ausjke
I have been a subscriber for years but stopped the subscription last year,
it's just that I'm doing less kernel related development these days.

lwn could do better though, make the website visually better, have a mobile
app, do some beginner friendly kernel corner and such, also add a save-my-
favorite-articles function under my account(last time I checked there is no
such thing), adding tag support,etc. In fact just moving to wordpress will
probably solve many of its website "issues" so it can focus on the content as
it has been for a long time. You need the landing page stay up to date to
attract new and young subscribers.

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xorcist
Sad to hear this. The quality is top notch. I have used them as an example
that people willingly pay for quality several times.

------
anders098
I know that Jonathan Corbet is having cancer but he still keep working on and
supporting this site. Not mentioning this is the best place for kernel
developers, hackers to keep up with latest kernel news. God bless Jon.

------
jasonkester
One minor idea. If you're an organization defined by a mystery three letter
acronym, do people a favor and define it somewhere. Since it's not in this
post or on the lwn.net homepage, here's the LWN faq:

[http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn](http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn)

Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar
with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN"
stands for.

If you want people to subscribe to your thing, step one should be to tell us
what it is.

~~~
BigDaddyD
So what does it mean?

~~~
r3bl
Currently, nothing. But it used to stand for "Linux Weekly News". Of course,
that name no longer makes sense since they're far away from producing only
weekly news, but they sticked to it, and I think that this is a reason why
they don't use their "full name" anymore.

------
MBCook
I've been supporting LWN for _years_ , because I love the Kernel page. I've
learned so much from reading it over the years. I don't know of anything else
like it. Their other articles are often great, but kernel nerdery is what
keeps me.

I'm happy to keep supporting them.

(Since others have commented on the design/redesign I'll say one thing: The
way the sidebar works now means I can't zoom text in on my iPad because it
gets covered by the sidebar. It's a serious functionality dent which I wish
would be fixed. That's it.)

Keep up the great work.

------
jimktrains2
This policy of having the strict title on the page is a bit much. The original
title provided context as to what this link was about; the current title, the
title on the page, is meaningless. It also makes the current top comment,
mherdeg's "There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this
article.." make little sense

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ris
LWN produce some of the highest quality articles around - well worth a
subscription. Something I think may harm their subscription rate is how
quickly they release articles to non-subscribers (1 week after publication?).
This makes it easy for non-subscribers to justify not going for the
subscription because "some weeks I don't get time to read LWN until a week
late anyway". I think it could easily be stretched to a couple of weeks IMHO.
Especially as the "subscriber link" mechanism is in place for articles readers
would like to share.

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d33
One thing that comes to my mind is that perhaps refreshing their website look-
and-feel would get them some new readers...

~~~
espadrine
Be honest: if you had not written this comment, would you have subscribed in
six months if they started looking like Medium 2.0?

~~~
johncolanduoni
The complaints in this thread are mostly things like spacing and broken
layouts, not fancy web X.0 fads. Hacker News is stylistically simple, but they
still pay attention to making the content readable without strain.

~~~
riffraff
> Hacker News is stylistically simple, but they still pay attention to making
> the content readable without strain.

really? The font size is smaller here than on LWN, and the width of the text
is smaller on LWN than on HN.

Comment metadata is slightly better on HN, but largely because on LWN you can
put a comment title and here you can't.

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peterwwillis
I've been reading LWN off and on for 10 years and just now found out it's a
subscription service. They might want to think about marketing.

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bogomipz
This is unfortunate as the content is amazing and $7 a month is quite
reasonable.

At a couple of places I have worked at we had a group subscription for the
department, $45 it not terribly hard to get approved. I think its a great perk
to list for prospective candidates too.

------
brandmeyer
Some employers will cover their employees' LWN subscriptions.

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honkhonkpants
I bet LWN could run entirely off some large subscriptions from companies like
Google, which employees hundreds of Linux kernel developers. LWN is legitimate
business information for many people and their employers. The model could be
similar to the legendary newsletters of yore, like "Shannon Knows DEC".

Maybe they don't want to refocus away from the public, but it could work.

~~~
mook
LWN does actually have corporate subscriptions. I currently work for one that
just requires me to log in to LWN from the company IP range once a month. I'd
guess, though, that is not quite enough to run the site.

------
ascendantlogic
As many have echoed here, the design and layout is very early 2000's. I
understand the minimalist and nostalgic aesthetic but I feel they could really
benefit from some small UX tweaks . It doesn't have to look like the latest
startup but it could definitely benefit from just some basic UX love and a
fresh coat of paint.

------
AceJohnny2
LWN is and has been the best in-depth news source about happenings in the
Linux world. I particularly love the articles explaining kernel internals, or
covering the pros and cons of some approaches.

I'm proud to have been a subscriber for the past 4 or 5 years.

