11 ms·

Some news from LWN

424 points by gghh 10y ago

d33 10y ago
One thing that comes to my mind is that perhaps refreshing their website look-and-feel would get them some new readers...
- espadrine 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      > 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.
    - Retr0spectrum 10y ago
      HN style is very functional and practical, but I wouldn't describe it as "readable without strain". The poor text contrast in many places makes it borderline unreadable, text posts in particular. My second complaint would be that line lengths are often too long to be easily readable.
    - r3bl 10y ago
      I disagree with the HN comment. I always look at it at 140% zoom on my desktop, I had to add some CSS rules using Stylish to make it look a bit more eye-appealing to me (nothing fancy, I just prefer reading on a dark background), nested comments are a beautiful thing for a discussion, but they're a mess when you're on a smartphone that nobody figured out how to adjust properly...
- distances 10y ago
  There recently was a site update that improved functionality on mobile devices. Weirdly though there were a couple of regressions at the same time: 1) The front page for logged in users changed to a less useful one-column layout, so now I always browse the site not logged in. 2) Previously the current and previous weekly editions were nicely visible in the sidebar. That isn't there any more. As a result I read much less of the actual articles, as they just don't catch my eye. I mostly just check the front page news column now. Anyway, I hope all the best for LWN, as the content is of very high quality indeed.
grabcocque 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    There's just as many (if not more) people doing systems programming as ever, there are just a lot more programmers in general and much of that growth has been in web development.
- ckastner 10y ago
  To be fair, LWN is more than just about Linux kernel development. I find it a useful aggregator of information of note from the F/OSS world. For example, as of right now, most of the articles on the front page aren't about kernel development: distro security updates, LibreOffice, Firefox, GnuPG, ...
bflesch 10y ago
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.
- bflesch 10y ago
  For the person downvoting me: Let's look at the article's comments. It is so hard to actually follow the conversation between the users. The article's title is repeated multiple times and has a red background. Underneath each comment's title is a full-height line with a font stating the UTC timestamp, and in the next line we can finally read the actual comment. I can't be the first person to criticise those issues, and from the fact that they haven't changed it already I think they actually don't care about these kind of things.
  - StevePerkins 10y ago
    Hacker News is a partially about deep, "real" tech (i.e. the old school Slashdot crowd)... and more largely about "tech fashion", entrepreneurial topics, and mildly interesting articles from The Atlantic in 2009. I didn't downvote your post... but I relate to the frustration that when we DO get content in the former category, the top comment is always a critique of website layout or font kerning or something else that tries to pull it into the second category. Can you just... not?
    - sp332 10y ago
      The point of an in-depth site like LWN is to communicate information to the readers. If the article and table layout make the information confusing and hard to access, that's not "fashion".
ersii 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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).
xorcist 10y ago
Sad to hear this. The quality is top notch. I have used them as an example that people willingly pay for quality several times.
gluegadget 10y ago
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.
- leephillips 10y ago
  As an occasional writer for LWN, thank you for supporting them and helping make it possible for LWN to pay for articles. (I don't write about the kernel, though.)
- karma_vaccum123 10y ago
  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_ 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      I'm not afraid of hyperlinking, but I don't need to pay for it either.
seesomesense 10y ago
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.
ajdlinux 10y ago
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!
jasonkester 10y ago
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 10y ago
  So what does it mean?
  - nl 10y ago
    "Linux Weekly News"
  - r3bl 10y ago
    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.
- iokanuon 10y ago
  >The acronym "LWN" originally stood for Linux Weekly News; that name is no longer used because the site no longer covers exclusively Linux-related topics, and it has daily as well as weekly content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LWN.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LWN.net
- cdesai 10y ago
  It actually does tell you. "What does LWN stand for, anyway? LWN, initially, was "Linux Weekly News." That name has been deemphasized over time as we have moved beyond just the weekly coverage, and as we have looked at the free software community as a whole. We have yet to come up with a better meaning for LWN, however."
- 10y ago
mihok 10y ago
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!
AsyncAwait 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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
mherdeg 10y ago
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.
- randac 10y ago
  At least they tell you the price before making you create a login! I ran into this gem recently: https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/ https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/ https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/ What an odd name. Flog rappeling? Flo grappling? Eff log rap pling? /me loads page Ah, door #2.
  - stronglikedan 10y ago
    But how are they going to get you to opt-in to their spam, if they show you the prices first?
- rtpg 10y ago
  100% agree. There's nothing wrong with informing people that you can subscribe! A small Call To Action at the end of every post (Do you like this post? Help support us and get future content directly to your inbox by subscribing) would already do wonders! And having "Subscribe" in the sidebar. (If anyone from LWN is reading: use those words verbatim if you wish) There's no shame in this being a paid publication. Considering the anti-advertising demographic, many would be glad to help support an ad-free system.
- donpdonp 10y ago
  Yes this! I just scanned the article page and the front page. Surely there is a subscription link in the header somewhere.. nope.. surely there is subscription information in the nav bar on the left... nope... okay the horizonal bar in the left nav menu probably separates the article related menu items from the site administration menu items and subscription is below the bar... nope. well maybe its down in the footer (scroll scoll scoll).. nope. okay I see the articles in the left are the paid ones because of the green dollarysign, surely that is a link to information about subscriptions... nope. Okay found it in the middle of a paragraph on the front page. I think the nav could be improved.
Shugyousha 10y ago
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!
allendoerfer 10y ago
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.
- nekopa 10y ago
  IMHO, I think they should be really careful regarding your last point - marketing tactics. Gamification, i.e. badges, I don't think would go over too well with their subscriber demographic. I think something like a free month, a free public share of a link (I don't know LWN very well, but I do remember reading articles there which say that some member sponsored the article to make it public) or a bundle of $RELEVANT_TO_YOUR_INTERESTS white papers may work better. Otherwise I think you make some very solid points, especially trying to find out how to subscribe was much harder than it should be...
- rilut 10y ago
  > - 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 10y ago
    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.
- vacri 10y ago
  >"Invite a new subscriber to get this badge." Which would then have to be displayed, which would be more visual spam for no good reason, which would piss off the core users.
ausjke 10y ago
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.
mplewis 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
ascendantlogic 10y ago
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.
brandmeyer 10y ago
Some employers will cover their employees' LWN subscriptions.
filereaper 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
anders098 10y ago
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.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
bogomipz 10y ago
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.
peterwwillis 10y ago
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.
MBCook 10y ago
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 10y ago
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
AceJohnny2 10y ago
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.
ris 10y ago
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.

424 points by gghh 10y ago

d33 10y ago

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

espadrine 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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.
  - Retr0spectrum 10y ago
    HN style is very functional and practical, but I wouldn't describe it as "readable without strain". The poor text contrast in many places makes it borderline unreadable, text posts in particular. My second complaint would be that line lengths are often too long to be easily readable.
  - r3bl 10y ago
    I disagree with the HN comment. I always look at it at 140% zoom on my desktop, I had to add some CSS rules using Stylish to make it look a bit more eye-appealing to me (nothing fancy, I just prefer reading on a dark background), nested comments are a beautiful thing for a discussion, but they're a mess when you're on a smartphone that nobody figured out how to adjust properly...
distances 10y ago
There recently was a site update that improved functionality on mobile devices. Weirdly though there were a couple of regressions at the same time: 1) The front page for logged in users changed to a less useful one-column layout, so now I always browse the site not logged in. 2) Previously the current and previous weekly editions were nicely visible in the sidebar. That isn't there any more. As a result I read much less of the actual articles, as they just don't catch my eye. I mostly just check the front page news column now. Anyway, I hope all the best for LWN, as the content is of very high quality indeed.

grabcocque 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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
- mwfunk 10y ago
  There's just as many (if not more) people doing systems programming as ever, there are just a lot more programmers in general and much of that growth has been in web development.
ckastner 10y ago
To be fair, LWN is more than just about Linux kernel development. I find it a useful aggregator of information of note from the F/OSS world. For example, as of right now, most of the articles on the front page aren't about kernel development: distro security updates, LibreOffice, Firefox, GnuPG, ...

bflesch 10y ago

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.

bflesch 10y ago
For the person downvoting me: Let's look at the article's comments. It is so hard to actually follow the conversation between the users. The article's title is repeated multiple times and has a red background. Underneath each comment's title is a full-height line with a font stating the UTC timestamp, and in the next line we can finally read the actual comment. I can't be the first person to criticise those issues, and from the fact that they haven't changed it already I think they actually don't care about these kind of things.
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  Hacker News is a partially about deep, "real" tech (i.e. the old school Slashdot crowd)... and more largely about "tech fashion", entrepreneurial topics, and mildly interesting articles from The Atlantic in 2009. I didn't downvote your post... but I relate to the frustration that when we DO get content in the former category, the top comment is always a critique of website layout or font kerning or something else that tries to pull it into the second category. Can you just... not?
  - sp332 10y ago
    The point of an in-depth site like LWN is to communicate information to the readers. If the article and table layout make the information confusing and hard to access, that's not "fashion".

ersii 10y ago

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 10y ago
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).

xorcist 10y ago

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

gluegadget 10y ago

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.

leephillips 10y ago
As an occasional writer for LWN, thank you for supporting them and helping make it possible for LWN to pay for articles. (I don't write about the kernel, though.)
karma_vaccum123 10y ago
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_ 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    I'm not afraid of hyperlinking, but I don't need to pay for it either.

seesomesense 10y ago

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.

ajdlinux 10y ago

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!

jasonkester 10y ago

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 10y ago
So what does it mean?
- nl 10y ago
  "Linux Weekly News"
- r3bl 10y ago
  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.
iokanuon 10y ago
>The acronym "LWN" originally stood for Linux Weekly News; that name is no longer used because the site no longer covers exclusively Linux-related topics, and it has daily as well as weekly content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LWN.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LWN.net
cdesai 10y ago
It actually does tell you. "What does LWN stand for, anyway? LWN, initially, was "Linux Weekly News." That name has been deemphasized over time as we have moved beyond just the weekly coverage, and as we have looked at the free software community as a whole. We have yet to come up with a better meaning for LWN, however."
10y ago

mihok 10y ago

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!

AsyncAwait 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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

mherdeg 10y ago

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.

randac 10y ago
At least they tell you the price before making you create a login! I ran into this gem recently: https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/ https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/
- zeveb 10y ago
  > https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/ https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/ What an odd name. Flog rappeling? Flo grappling? Eff log rap pling? /me loads page Ah, door #2.
- stronglikedan 10y ago
  But how are they going to get you to opt-in to their spam, if they show you the prices first?
rtpg 10y ago
100% agree. There's nothing wrong with informing people that you can subscribe! A small Call To Action at the end of every post (Do you like this post? Help support us and get future content directly to your inbox by subscribing) would already do wonders! And having "Subscribe" in the sidebar. (If anyone from LWN is reading: use those words verbatim if you wish) There's no shame in this being a paid publication. Considering the anti-advertising demographic, many would be glad to help support an ad-free system.
donpdonp 10y ago
Yes this! I just scanned the article page and the front page. Surely there is a subscription link in the header somewhere.. nope.. surely there is subscription information in the nav bar on the left... nope... okay the horizonal bar in the left nav menu probably separates the article related menu items from the site administration menu items and subscription is below the bar... nope. well maybe its down in the footer (scroll scoll scoll).. nope. okay I see the articles in the left are the paid ones because of the green dollarysign, surely that is a link to information about subscriptions... nope. Okay found it in the middle of a paragraph on the front page. I think the nav could be improved.

Shugyousha 10y ago

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!

allendoerfer 10y ago

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.

nekopa 10y ago
IMHO, I think they should be really careful regarding your last point - marketing tactics. Gamification, i.e. badges, I don't think would go over too well with their subscriber demographic. I think something like a free month, a free public share of a link (I don't know LWN very well, but I do remember reading articles there which say that some member sponsored the article to make it public) or a bundle of $RELEVANT_TO_YOUR_INTERESTS white papers may work better. Otherwise I think you make some very solid points, especially trying to find out how to subscribe was much harder than it should be...
rilut 10y ago
> - 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 10y ago
  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.
vacri 10y ago
>"Invite a new subscriber to get this badge." Which would then have to be displayed, which would be more visual spam for no good reason, which would piss off the core users.

ausjke 10y ago

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.

mplewis 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

ascendantlogic 10y ago

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.

brandmeyer 10y ago

Some employers will cover their employees' LWN subscriptions.

filereaper 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

anders098 10y ago

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.

honkhonkpants 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

bogomipz 10y ago

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.

peterwwillis 10y ago

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.

MBCook 10y ago

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 10y ago

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

AceJohnny2 10y ago

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.

ris 10y ago

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.