Anyone here rocking the Linux Format magazines?
Believe this is one of the few vendors left making and distributing Linux magazines still(?). Would be interesting to hear what peoples feedback on these are, whether its this one or another. Seems like a fun monthly delivery to get!
Source; https://www.magazinesdirect.com/az-single-issues/6937009/linux-format-magazine-single-issue.thtml
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!
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.
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! 😅
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.
Oh, ok.
So anyway, arguably more than now, where every distro needs you to download an iso and use some application, most likely third party, since that is what every distro's install instructions suggest, to make a bootable external drive on some device that already works, then manually boot into it.
I swear if missing the usability forest for the tech minutia trees was free marketing Linux would dominate the desktop OS landscape.
Isn't dd a third party software?
No. It is part of gnu coreutils. They're part of any Linux distro.