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 thin

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.