I subscribed from the very beginning, number 1! I subscribe to keep myself up to date with the Linux ecosystem. Articles about the Wine Project for running Windows app under Linux were my favorite. My first distros were SLS Softlanding Linux Systems and Debian 0.93.

I've subscribed for more then 10 years. I have been working with Linux since college, and in my day to day, there is a set of Linux servers I had to administer, and in some cases do some kernel tunning, and Linux Journal was very good source of information, tips and knowledge. Favorite LJ memory is hacks from Kyle Rankin that I always had the opportunity to try at work. My first distro was Red Hat and the installation was using set of CD-ROMs.

The first issue I received was #10. Back in 1994, already being enthusiastic about Linux, I discovered one of my fellow students at Uni had an issue with him. I got some sort of coupon, from inside the magazine that I could fill out with my details, and I sent it off. I still retain the in print versions I have gotten over the years in my library. It's not very Marie Kondo-like, but I have good memories of learning new technologies in there. Reuven's first article on Ruby on Rails is my favorite memory. Or, this is I believe, from an issue before #10, but the one about the HTTP protocol and the possibilities it could have.

My first distribution was 40 floppy SlackWare on a multi-day run between Uni and my dorm room (I owned ~20 blank floppies).

I've been a subscriber for quite a while, and I enjoy quite a bit reading the LJ issues once they arrive. I'm very impressed by the quality and the skills of those that write articles for the journal, and I hope it can continue for the next 25 years. I've subscribed for approx. 15 years to keep myself updated on the Linux community. My favorite LJ memory is when the journal was "rescued" and re-started. My first distro was Red Hat Linux 5 (I think that was the version number).

As far as my subscription, I had to search through my emails (order conformation), and the oldest I found dates back to 2005. I subscribe to support your work and to learn something new every now and then. It's simply not possible to review all Linux applications and news on my own. With so much high quality content, it's not so easy for me to pick one favorite memory. What I've really enjoyed reading since the beginning are the columns (EOF, Hack and /, Work the Shell, diff -u, ...). My first distro? That's a hard question. Most probably it was SuSE. Currently, I'm on Manjaro after a few years of using KUbuntu and some others.

I started subscribing to Linux Journal in 2000. I subscribe because I am interested in what is happening in Linux. It was so cool to use Slackware and a bunch of floppy drives to get a multi-user multi-tasking UNIX-like operating system on my PC. I was much happier using Red Hat 4.2 on a CDROM however. My favorite Linux Journal memory is when it came back from the dead.

I've been a subscriber since some point in 1997. (I had to let go of my paper back issues long ago.) I continue to subscribe to LJ because of the relevance of its focus to my own professional and hobby use of Linux. As I see each new cover for the first time, more often than not, I'm pleasantly surprised to find that the focus of the new issue aligns with some topic I'd very recently either unearthed, or meant to delve into, but had not had time for.

I have many great memories of LJ over the years. One that amused me was the tongue-in-cheek backlash against Marcel Gagné's Cooking with Linux column. I always appreciated his lighthearted style and use of recipes as a metaphor for installing software—prescient, given the rise of automation tools based on, yes, recipes and cookbooks.

I suppose unpacking tarballs to install software was always near to my heart considering I started with Slakware (from the 1994 InfoMagic CDROM set, still hanging on my wall).

Here's to many more years!

I've been a subscriber since the first stapled one. It's just a fun read My favorites were the "best of" articles. My first distro was Slackware, 1994/5, on a 386SX.

Prior to 1994, I always used VMS and UNIX-based systems professionally, and when I booted Slackware on a 386SX (with way too little memory), I was flabbergasted when I saw the familiar X-terminal in the twm window manager. It took minutes to load and was quite useless, but the fact that at home I could run this, I was sold. I still had my 3b1 (an AT&T box with a 10 MHz 68010 processor). I immediately put a 486DX2-66 box together, which was the state of the art at the time, and ran my benchmarks, outperforming my Sun3 and even Sun4 at the office. For some professional work, I keep a list of benchmarks of an N-body code. Both the 16MHz 386SX and the 68010 did not have a floating point processor and ran this particular code in 87" and 49" resp. A Sun-4/60 would run this in 1", but the 486 in 0.093", more than 10 times faster. For comparison, one of my modern desktops would run this in 0.00030", about 300 times the speed of the 486.

I can also add that I converted our group from Solaris to Linux. We still run Linux on all of our desktops, although quite a few of my colleagues have switched to the almost-UNIX laptops that Apple sells.

I've been a subscriber since 2009 for the interesting articles and many opportunities to discover. Too many favorites to put here—there's just always interesting articles and ideas to explore after reading them in Linux Journal. My most recent favorite memory was definitely the restart after the short break. My first distribution was quite possibly Mandriva around 2000.

I've been a subscriber for a dozen years, maybe longer, but the earliest receipt I can find in my email is from 07-Apr-2007. I subscribe to support the movement! My favorite memory: it is not just content, I like it all—it was how nostalgic I felt when I realized that the publication will be going online and I would no longer hold it in my hands. I like the electronic version, I just realized how much I love my LJ! First distro was Debian.

Subscriber since 2012. Favourite: Doc Searls' posts. First distro: Debian Woody

I'vew subscribed for about five years (with gaps). It is a very useful magazine, and it's about Linux, enough said! My favorite is Shawn Powers' useful articles with humor. I remember reading a part on wives and although they prevent us from taking the switches apart and jacking them up to crontabs, they keep us well fed and dressed! :D I cannot remember my first distribution, but I usually prefer the ones featuring Security.

I recall stumbling across a howto that layed out the basics of setting up point-to-point protocol and supporting telnet between two Linux boxen. I was all over that and had my connection from home to work running in a flash. It was the first time anyone in my shop had every heard of Linux. The year? 1996.

My first distro? Here, I'll try this one from memory, SLS 0.99pl45. I believe the pl stood for "patch level". My first requirement: obtain about 25 3.25" floppies for the download, about 15 of which were for X alone.

Above is me, Ray Foulkes, having fun on holidays. I am 73 years old and have been a Linux Journal subscriber for er, I think since the beginning of time (that is, I have forgotten). The earliest email I have from you is April 2007. Prior to my retirement 15 years ago, I was a VP of a large organization in Europe. My remit was entirely technical and had been the whole of my career in computing (since 1969). Why do I still subscribe? Primarily, I like your style, and I like to keep up to date with what is going on in the Linux world.

I am however a Linux user rather than a Linux developer or experimenter. I have seen in various magazines the "desktops" of various readers. They all look beautifully neat. To illustrate my use of Linux (and other OSes), I thought that I would send you an image of the reality of my desktop as opposed to the marketing version, and then explain my use of Linux.

The two large screens are one of three OpenSuse "desktops". The one on the left is showing my "domestic" desktop, which is Linux Mint (a somewhat old version) running under VMware Workstation on the OpenSUSE host. There I do my email and fun browsing (like now), but normally it (and the other large screen) contains several windows of the SEGGER development environment, Kfind, Kate, Kompare, Ultraedit (sometimes), plus various other technical tools as well as a couple terminal windows (for midnight commander, etc.). That is just as cluttered as the rest of my physical desktop.

The portable to the right-hand side is (close your eyes here) a Windows 10 machine for doing those things that even my VMware Windows image cannot do (such as deal with obscure USB devices). It also does things that Linux cannot do (such as run technical programs written and supported only on Windows).

Just peeping around the end of the large screen to the right is an EEEpc 901 (upgraded EEprom) running LXDE, which I take with me on journeys if I think someone is likely to steal my PC (good luck with selling an EEEpc).

The large telephone is an IP extension to my friend's exchange in his house in the UK. I failed to mention that the above setup is in France, by the way. If you look carefully, you will see bits of electronics with wires scattered about. These are the nRF52 development cards (and some targets, but too small to see). I am developing software using the large machines for these little radios that contain an ARM Cortex processor running at 64MHz, 1Mbyte EEprom and 256Kbyte RAM together with the 2.4GHz radio, and no, they are not running Linux before you ask. The box at the back between the screens is an oscilloscope (only runs on Windows though), which I use for checking the digital signals coming from the nRF52s.

My electronics desk (just as cluttered) sits to the left of this one with the usual array of magnifying glasses, solder station, wires, chips and so on.

So, by preference, I am a Linux rather than a Windows user. Although you can see a pretty picture on the right-hand screen, I really don't give much of a hoot about how pretty my desktop looks or whether windows fold as I close them. Although I keep my machines fully patched up, I try very hard not to upgrade to some new version. My desire is stability, not just in the technical sense of not crashing, but in the human sense of not having to learn yet another way of doing something, searching menus that some cretin thinks should be shuffled, missing facilities that someone thinks "simplifies my life", banning me from putting things where I like on my screen desktop etc., etc., etc. I am not totally immune to improvements, but the gain has to be worth the pain. After all, in my career I have learned to use at least 20 text editors, so learning another one should be easy. However, I have a "day job" so to speak, so I will stick with what I know, thanks. I used to use the GNU toolchain (I still do in a sense since SEGGER uses the GNU compiler) but the SEGGER development environment saves me from having 20 windows open when debugging two nRF52 simultaneously (the penalty of developing radio software). SEGGER took a lot less time to learn than GNU compiler, linker, debugger and speeded up my development so learning it was worthwhile. I had already confronted Eclipse and, like it's name, decided that it was obscure(d).

During my career I was somewhat guilty of pushing Linux long before it was ready for prime time. I tried a few times but my R&D team routinely came back with the "you gotta be kidding" result. I have happily watched its amazing progress, both through using it and following its development in the press, such as in Linux Journal. I started off (if I faintly recall) by buying a boxed Suse, which I feel has been one of the most stable Linux distributions over its lifetime.

So, there you have it. You now know one of your loyal readers just a little bit better—not a "no Windows" person, but still a Linux advocate.

I've been a subscriber from the beginning, I used Linux when I could install a Slackware (I think) with two diskettes as far as I remember. LJ was the reference to learn how to use and to correct errors. It's interesting, well written, inspiring.

I believe that, despite being a loyal subscriber for so many years, this is the first time I've written to LJ. After 25 years, however, I thought it was about time.

Well, if I recall correctly I've been a LJ subscriber since 1995 or 1996. I remember I found the magazine at an international newsstand here in Rome. Then, after voraciously reading it, I immediately decided to subscribe (althrough the subscription was by snail mail, no online subscriptions yet). At that time, it was the one and only Linux magazine I could find, and I was thrilled and amazed by the quality of its articles (and still am nowadays, by the way).

I was learning and studying Linux (first distribution was Slackware 0.something), and I realized that reading LJ was a tremendous help and pleasure, also because the documentation was very sparse and difficult to find (no internet as we know it today, no Google). My favorite LJ memory is probably the eagerness to open the LJ envelope just after receiving the magazine in my mailbox and start reading it, line by line, ad by ad, consuming the paper pages.

Today, so many things have changed in our lives, in our jobs, but for me, Linux Journal still means the same old pleasure of learning something interesting and valuable.

Thank you all, for being a loyal companion to me for so much time and keep up the great work!

I've been a subscriber for about two years. I like the info on what is being used and the Bash Programming articles. My favorite is trying out the Bash programming examples from Dave, and learning syntax is everything still even after all these years. My first distro originally was Caldera Open Linux (2.0 kernel if I remember correctly), then I moved to Slackware 3.4 around 1997 I think (now running Slackware 14.2).

I've subscribed to the magazine since October 2018. I am interested in the development of open source and the implementation of projects in open code. As practice shows, open-source solutions are more flexible and reliable, although it requires a lot of work on the correct configuration of the system and code.

The first distribution I used was Debian 3.0, a branch of Debian with a long history, and I think it's simple enough for beginners to use. At the moment, more attention is paid to the branch of Red Hat, in particular Centos.

LJ has been a good friend for more than a decade. I was a member in the earlier times around the 2000s and later on as well. It's a valuable treasure cove full of invaluable insights and information on a broad spectrum of Linux-based application landscape. My favorite LJ memory is the perserverance of LJ and the editors keeping LJ alive for the "so-manyth-time" around. Keep up the good work! My first distro was Slackware 2.2, which came on the Infomagic.com "LINUX Developer's Resource" of March 1995. I still have this CD set. It's the treasure of my home office.

I've been a subscriber for nine years. I've always been always passionate about learning new technologies, knowing about what other people are doing in this field (Linux, system administration, DevOps, Security) and open source projects, so I found the content of the magazine really covering most of these interesting topics to me, at different levels. So this is how I support the LJ team's work.

I remember very well that a good friend (Howard Pepper), which is the best person I know when it comes to writing shell scripts, worked on a script to calculate the day of the week for a given date, and then a few issues later we saw an article from Dave Taylor with a similar topic, and then my friend wrote to the magazine to mention his solution, which eventually made it to the Letters section of the magazine, and Howard showed it to me very proudly, and even Dave recognized his skills.

Mandrake was my first distro.

I've subscribed since 2011. I like the content and didn't like having to use a non-Linux machine to read most of the others. My favorite LJ memory is seeing you back in print. First distro was Trans-Ameritech V1.0 March 1995, installed with my first and very expensive CD drive. Post traumatic stress from SCO Unix install on 53! floppy disks!!!

I've subscribed for about 15 years (best guess). Why? I'm a Linux user. I believe in sharing and the open source approach to software development. I support that community in different ways, Linux Journal being one of them. I also find practical advice, general trends, and (from Doc Searls) abstract concepts to ponder. More recently, I've been listening to your podcast.

Favorite memory? Learning that the animation industry was using Linux heavily for their 3D rendering farms in an LJ article many years ago. It was rewarding to think my kids benefited from Linux in a very direct and meaningful way.

First distro? Red Hat Linux v4. I knew folks who were using Yggdrasil Linux and Slackware, but I wasn't able to buy a computer until later when Red Hat rose in popularity. I still remember my surprise when Ted Ts'o (kernel developer) replied to a modem driver question I posted.

I stuck with Red Hat Linux until they phased it out with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and before they got Fedora stable. I moved to Mandrake until it changed owners and changed its name to Mandriva. I then tried SuSE for a bit, but eventually got hooked on Kubuntu until the KDE 4 disaster. Then it was onto Ubuntu until they went with Unity. I've been on Linux Mint since.

I'm one of the founding members of the Romanian Linux Users Group (RLUG). I've been using Linux since ~1995, first as a hobby, then as a professional. The first distribution I used was Slackware, installed from (a backpack with) 30 floppy disks.

I've been a subscriber since around 2000–2001. I keep my Linux Journal subscription because it makes me zen.

I've been a subscriber 20+ years for access to Linux-related howtos. My favorite Linux memory is powering up X11 on Yggdrasil on my i386. My first distro was TAMU in 1992. See an article I wrote for LJ here.

I have been a subscriber since September 2017 (having the issues paid until the December 2020). I have subscribed to LJ because it is an old and really relevant part of the GNU/Linux history. I have read articles on the website and decided to give it a try.

I was very upset when Linux Journal cancelled the publications, and immediately bought the archive to help LJ to survive. But that was the first step to the best memories, as the journal is alive again, and that is wonderful. Long live the king! And realizing Dave Taylor is "our guy" as well, I really appreciate his work on DooM.

I tried Kubuntu in 2010, and it was my first distribution and a step away from Windows XP. Without a doubt, it was the cool step. I have tried some other distributions like OpenSuse, Fedora, Arch and different *buntu flavors, but I still stay with pure and stable Debian at home and Debian/CentOS for my own needs on the VPS.

I would like to thank you for sharing the knowledge, the passion to the FLOSS community, to all that we have now. No one would conquer the mountain without a movement, and as far as we know, the world without borders and walls hardly needs Windows and Gates. But we can forgive them everything and live our own lives.

I subscribe for the Quality and diversity of the articles. There has always been at least one article, and usually more than one, that I find interesting or useful. And they have always been well written.

My favorite LJ memory is when I read my email that said Linux Journal was back from the dead!

My first distro was Linux Systems Laboratory Linux release 0.99 on about 60 3 1/2" double-sided/double-density floppy disks.

I have been a subscriber for approximately 11 years. I subscribe for the insightful "How-to" articles on various Linux-based software solutions as well as for Kyle Rankin's command-line articles. My favorite memories from Linux Journal were the video introductions by Shawn Powers. His enthusiasm and passion in those short videos made me want to dig into each issue that much quicker.

My first experience with Linux was with S.u.S.E. and Red Hat in 1997. The first distribution I installed to a personal machine for my own use was Mandrake in 1999. I currently have Linux Mint installed on a home laptop and a home desktop.

I've been reading LJ off and on for many years. I honestly don't recall how far back my mags went, but I converted to a cd copy and tossed them. It's the info that is important to me. I have enjoyed the columns about BASH, various things folks have done with Linux (web servers, camera apps, games, databases, etc.) and the op-ed pieces. Overall, there is nothing about LJ that I have taken exception with. Different opinions sure. But layout, goals, presentation have been just great. I've been playing with this stuff since Slackware 0.99pl14, installed via gravis sound card as the cdrom interface for a sony cd reader on a gateway 486 computer. I kept the turbo boost toggled on for kicks. I had to hand-patch the interrupts for the internal modem because it was not keeping the update. After a month or so, I dumped the internal for an external. That was the last desktop computer I bought. I have built everything since.

I've been a subscriber for about 14 years. I have always believed that Linux is an operating system that will be here to stay. As an IT professional, I need to keep up to date on what goes on in the operating system arena. Linux Journal is my go-to magazine for that information on Linux. I enjoy getting to go through every page each month, reading the articles that peak my interest and trying out the new things that I learned from the magazine. First distro was Red Hat 5.0.

I've been a subscriber for two months. It was a gift from my wife at Christmas. I moved from Mac to Linux in 2018. New to Linux, I'm a sponge for information. My first distro was PopOS!

I've subscribed since 1995 because I love Linux. My favorite LJ memory is building a virtual juke box. First distro was Slackware.

The first Issue I remember was November 1994, and Samba was the topic. I have been a longtime UNIX user/administrator and wanted to find out more about this Linux thing, so I grabbed an old machine and about 2 million floppy disks from Slackware, and after an awful long time, BAM! I had my very own Linux box. I felt very much at home with it coming from UNIX. Then came getting the GUI to work, mode lines and a few hundred obscure settings later, I had X up and running. Then getting it to talk with the hated enemy, Windows! The excitement for me was to be able to rip into the guts and poke all the corners. Tune that baby to a fare thee well. Great fun, and of course I could do it all better than anyone else—NOT, but I tried. Thanks for a great rag.

I've been a subscriber for about 5 years, with an interruption in there somewhere. I enjoy the articles, find them pertinent and interesting as well as informative. LJ often leads me to a tool or a configuration setting that improves my knowledge. Favorite LJ memory: I emailed an article author who was covering Nextcloud setup and usage. He replied in a timely way and was encouraging, seeming to take my input positively. I really appreciated that.

First distribution: I don't recall the actual "version". It was pre-v1.0 and came in a tarball, which broke out to about 80 3.5" floppy disks. It took me a whole morning to load it on a 386SX. Getting X up and running took another half a day. I suppose that if one insisted on an actual "distribution", it was I believe Red Hat. Later on it was Mandrake, then onto SUSE, and some others for short times. I like any Debian-based distro for the most part. But whatever it is, it has to be able to run Enlightenment. That is my one irrational requirement.

I have been a subscriber since at least 2006, and I have many back issues stacked up in my basement that I plan to look through "one day". I started using FreeBSD back in 1997 when a friend gave me a copy on 3.5 inch floppies, including X-windows on about 30 disks. Getting a CD reader was a great advance a couple years later. I switched to Linux quite soon after, but I don't remember which distribution. Mint is my favorite distro at the moment, and I have tried many others using VirtualBox.

I enjoy Linux Journal for its in-depth articles on many topics, although I am a bit out of my depth sometimes. I retired in 2006, when I was the open source advocate for a Canadian government department.

The July 2006 issue got me interested in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, which were new to me. Ruby is a interesting alternative to Python, which I was using quite heavily at the time. The same issue had an excellent article on OpenSSL, which I read thoroughly.

My name is Chris Rheinherren and I've been a subscriber of Linux Journal for at least 5 years if not a few more beyond that. I got interested in Linux and was looking around for a magazine, and tried a few of them but prefer Linux Journal as a professional magazine.

I first started out with Simply Mepis and later moved on to Fedora and Ubuntu. I currently use Ubuntu almost exclusively. I have written a couple articles for Full Circle magazine, a community-based magazine for Ubuntu users.

I own and operate a small IRC network that uses Linux servers and manage several websites as well.

I've been a subscriber for 21 years. I was a UNIX system programmer and found that Linux was a cheap way to run a UNIX-like system in my home lab. Linux Journal was a very good way of keeping up with what was happening on the platform. I think the fact the journal is back publishing again is my "favorite memory". I think my first distro was the Caldera Desktop Distribution from the mid-1990s.

Congratulations on 25 years of Linux Journal! That's quite an achievement, and I'm very lucky to have been around for a good chunk of it. So many great articles over all these years. Really great when it used to be on the newstand as well, and I still miss that, but I know time marches on. Keep up the great work for the next 25 years.

I don't remember how long I've been a subscriber to Linux Journal, but I know it was pretty early in its history. Maybe 1995 or so.

I am a longtime Linux user. I started with Linux in 1993. I was a "power" MS-DOS user at the time, but frequently used the UNIX computer labs in the computer science department, especially to write data analysis programs for my physics labs. I wanted the same power on my PC at home. I asked around on the Usenet newsgroups and someone recommended this new thing called "Linux". It was free and I could run it on my '386 computer. I paid someone to mail me a stack of 3 1/2-inch floppies with the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) distribution installer. At the time, SLS advertised itself as a "Gentle Touchdowns for DOS Bailouts" and it certainly was easy enough for me.

That was my first introduction to Linux. Linux was still pretty rough; we didn't have kernel modules in the pre-1.0 days. If you wanted to add support for a sound card or floppy tape drive, you had to compile a custom kernel. But it was enough for me. I was immediately hooked. I'm still running Linux (Fedora 29) and loving it.

I have written or contributed to dozens of open-source software programs since the 1990s, but the one I'll be known for is FreeDOS, a free software/open source software implementation of DOS. And it's interesting to note that FreeDOS would not have happened without Linux. In 1994, when it seemed certain Microsoft would stop developing MS-DOS, I thought, "If people could come together to create a free version of UNIX (Linux), I'm sure we could do the same with DOS (FreeDOS)." And that's what happened. It was because of Linux's success that I decided to start FreeDOS.

I've been a subscriber since fall 2001. I subscribe to Linux Journal to support the community that supports Open Source. My favorite Linux Journal memory is seeing an article written by a fellow graduate of Grafton (North Dakota) High School. My first distribution was a flavor of Slackware...I think I still have the CDs it came on.

Best regards and keep up the good fight.

I've been a subscriber for three years I believe (since before the current version of LJ). I am a life-long learner and computers, OS and FOSS, alternatives, are part of that learning. I think the long Kyle Rankin write-up of Qubes was pretty fantastic. Before I installed (wiping Windows for good) and used my current two Ubuntu variations, I installed Debian as my default on a desktop and a couple virtual machines before that.

I'm from Chicago, and I've been a Linux Journal subscriber for over a decade now. I love the topics covered therein, along with useful tips, ideas and tech trends covered by the writers of Linux Journal. One of my favorite memories related to Linux Journal is actually the "Open Video to HP" by Shawn Powers, after he found out that HP blindly endorsed Windows Vista for its lightweight netbook for educational purposes. I am proud to continue supporting Linux Journal and their work.

I've been a continuous subscriber since the first issue, with two subscriptions (work and home) during the print era. I subscribe to keep up with Linux developments, necessary for a Linux admin. My first distro was Yggdrasil.

I have been a reader and subscriber for 10+ years! I subscribe because it is the most useful and unbiased publication on Linux and technology in the world. My favorite memory is when LJL rose from the proverbial grave to continue publishing! My first distribution was Red Hat 7 (pre-RHEL, Centos and Fedora), and my first UNIX was AT&T Unix 1.0 I've been a SysAdmin/DevOps engineer for almost 30 years and a "button pusher" since about age 5.

Attached is a picture of me performing at a concert for "Concord (CA) Night Out.

I've been a subscriber since about early 2003. I started following Linux Journal during the SCO fiasco, where SCO sued various vendors claiming code had been taken from Unix System V. You might recall I posted a letter denying such taking, when I was VP of Engineering at then SGI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93SGI_code_dispute_of_2003. I don't see that my letter itself was captured by wikipedia, so I attach a copy. Linux Journal has always been a great reference for industry information, as well as technical information!

Regarding my favorite memory, I am not certain that LJ published responses to my letter, but in general, I remember a very big outpouring of support from the Linux community for our defense of Linux against SCO. I remember being very happy to see such support!

I've been a subscriber for 18 years, minus a five-month hiatus when you went 100% digital and it seemed outrageous to me at the time. Now, of course, it'd feel 10x more outrageous if you were to switch back to paper.

I would highlight that the articles are not just all technical info but also have a bit of a personal touch, where the authors show you all the journey, not only the right solution but also how they got there and what they got wrong along the way. What's my favorite LJ memory? Well of course the resurrection in 2018 was pure joy. I appreciated a lot your fight to get the magazine going again. I first used Slackware circa 1998, and SuSE 6.2 is the first I ever purchased.

I wish you lot of subscribers, and I wish us, readers, great time while reading your articles. I've been a subscriber for three months, because I love Linux, libre software, and I wish to support this amazing magazine that brings tons of valuable information. My first distro was Mandrake FiveStar around year 2004, which my father bought for $25 USD in a pack with user manual. I was only 13, and the installation was not easy for me even though that user manual was translated to my language (Czech). Everything was done by the method of trial and error. No C:, command line and no games—well I was a kid, so I did not understand why would anybody use this thing. I was a slave of Microsloth during my teen years because of games. Linux has been my main OS for more than 5 years now, and I would not go back.

I've subscribed since about 2004. It is all a rollicking good read. Doc Searls is always compulsive reading. My first distro was one of the early Red Hats.

My favourite memory of using Linux was in 1997. I was working, in those days, at one of the five technical colleges in Oman. In those days we had Red Hat Linux 5.0, and my IT department had been using it for some time as the departmental file server for our Windows 95 clients in the computer labs and our staff rooms.

Our ministry issued all five of the colleges with a shiny new PC with NT server on it to run the college?~@~Ys network. For some reason, our college's NT server was the last to arrive. It came a long time after the other colleges had theirs, and by then I'd heard the reports of how bad it was and of how it broke down all the time. I remember how we installed the new kit in our server room but didn't connect it to anything. Instead, we connected the other two departments to our existing Linux server and just kept quiet about it.

I remember how, for years, the unreliability of those NT servers was a matter of ongoing controversy at the weekly deans' meetings. The acting dean of our college, who was also head of business studies, always reported how, to his firsthand knowledge, the NT server at our college was always working fine and had never given a single problem.

To the four other deans, our college was a source of bewilderment. We never came clean about it.

I've been a subscriber since around 1999. Favorite memory is Marcel Gangé starting an article saying "Bonjour mes amis" My first distro was SuSE, and nowadays it's OpenSuse Leap.

I think I have subscribed since your first issue. LJ has fact-filled information on my favorite operating system, and it's a testament to the power of open source. My favorite LJ memory is helping to port several hundred thousand lines of FORTRAN code over to GNU from an SGI Challenge and IRIX OS, thus saving the government a bundle of $$$, all with the help of LJ articles and the Linux community. First distro was Yggdrassil@ '92, and I still have the floppy. Keep up the good work folks! and thanks for being there.

I think I subscribed at the very outset, around 25 years ago anyway. I subscribed because I had downloaded one of the 0.9x releases of Linux back in whenever that was (1991?). A friend and I downloaded it onto floppy discs. I did the odd-numbered disks and he did the even-numbered ones. I can't remember how many nights it took us with 1200 baud modems. The excitement of finally booting up a UNIX system on my PC was incredible. When I proudly showed my wife the command line, she said "So?" Undaunted, we downloaded the X distribution the same way. Around 1994 I started working at a new firm and was really eager to insinuate Linux into their systems. At the time they were using various services for email, but mostly CompuServe. Without really asking for permission, I set up a Linux mail server on a little machine with 8meg of memory that was lying around unused and then announced to them that they had corporate email. I did the same with their web server—they didn't know they needed a web server. By the time I left that company, Microsoft Exchange had replaced the Linux email server, but nearly all their mission-critical systems were running on Linux in the background. Linux was bullet-proof. We had machines that ran for years under heavy loads with nary a crash.

Those were exciting days. We felt, somewhat arrogantly, that we could do anything and just about anything we did seemed like magic. Linux and open source made it happen.

I subscribed, for the first time, in 1994 starting with the third issue. In 1994 Linux Journal was the only magazine dedicated to Linux that was still a hobby project of Linus Torvalds. Today it's still a pleasure to read a magazine for Linux enthusiasts. I still remember an interview with some Google engineers (or maybe founders?) on why they choose Linux for their new search engine. At the time, they had 2,000 Linux servers. I installed Linux for the first time in May 1993, and I used the most popular distribution available at the time, it was SLS (Softlanding Linux System).

I've been a subscriber for 2 years. I get great information bits and outlooks that I apply to my current skills and tools. My favorite memory is when LJ announced they were coming back from the shutdown of the publication.

I've been a subscriber roughly one year. I subscribe to Linux Journal for the superb articles offered in the magazine each month. My favorite memory of LJ,/em> is the 1994 to 2018 download of each magazine over the years.

The first Linux distribution that I used was Red Hat, back in 1995.

It is great that you are celebrating 25 years of Linux Journal. Happy 25th birthday. And thank you for being there for the last 25 years.

I have been a Linux Journal,/em> subscriber for 20+ years I think. Earlier in my career, I had to develop a Linux system from scratch. Every package (I don't think there were packages and package managers then) had to be chosen carefully and optimized to fit into the limited space we had for an embedded system. While searching the newsstands (yes, we had magazines back then), I came across a copy of Linux Journal and found the contents interesting. I decided to subscribe mostly out of curiosity. I had started with Linux 1.0 that came on a couple floppy disks. I forget the name of the company that built that. Just by sheer luck, there was an article about building a Linux system from scratch that was published not too long after I started my subscription. That helped me tremendously in my project, and I wrote to the author thanking him profusely. I have been a subscriber ever since. I believe that for any open source publication to survive, we all need to support it. It is also a forum for all of us to share our experiences and help others so that they don't have to re-invent the wheel. The knowledge that we gain from others is invaluable. I also see this as a way for the Linux and Open Source community to connect with each other, and together we can make it better for everyone. Wishing Linux Journal the very best and hope that it will be there for the generations to come.

I've been a subscriber since 1992, I think. I was working at Cray Research, Inc., at the time and was very interested in a "Unix" that I wouldn't have to use my company's licenses/clout to have at home. That was when the Linux kernel was .02 or so I think. I remember doing ftp.funet.fi ftps several times, but the kernel was much smaller then. I saw an announcement about Linux Journal (on USENet?) and agreed with the comment about needing a respected journal to help further the cause of Linux, so I subscribed. I have many memories about LJ over the ages. One of my fav's was when Dave Taylor wrote his first column. I was like "Hey, isn't that the guy from HP I've traded emails with about ELM?" So that brought back some memories of my early days transitioning from being a IC designer to more of a software/OS-focused systems person.

Glad you folks have survived! I was greatly saddened when you announced you were closing the doors.

I'm Eduardo Díaz Comellas, writing from Galicia, in the NW of Spai. I've been subscriber of LJ for a long long time, so much I can't remember. Maybe it was in 1996 or 1997. Purchasing LJ in Spain was a big deal, as shipping was more expensive than the magazine itself! I loved those first days of Linux, and LJ was great part of the joy. I discovered myself month after month reading in LJ exactly the topics I was investigating those days. I even thought that LJ had mind-reading skills.

I've always loved the mix of levels in LJ. Some articles for starters, others very specific and advanced...and always interesting. Perl programming, sysadmin stuff—great fun. When, some years after, I started my own consulting business, my LJ was available for all the IT staff.

For 25 more years to come! Cheers!

I'm pretty certain we started in the late 1990s. Why do I subscribe to Linux Journal? Nostalgia! No, not really—it's just in case another "editor wars" kicks off—I love a good editor war. Seriously, it's because there is so much going on in the Linux community now that I think you need some sort of aggregator to fish out what is important, do a bit of horizon scanning, etc.

My favorite memory is seeing the org-mode article in LJ. I used org-mode to run my life for nearly 8 years, and it was great to see someone else raving about it. Of course, I've moved back to vim now. Fickle.

Our NHS laboratory used our first UNIX distro (CTIX from Convergent Technology) on a CT Miniframe we bought in 1986/7, and it came with CT's version of System V.2 as I recall. It also came with a set of system 5 manuals in hard copy format in ring binders. I spent many a happy evening learning about awk, sed, ls, vi, etc. When we retired it, we donated it to the Swansea University Computing club, and Alan Cox and someone else (apologies for not remembering your name) came along to pick it up and gave me a bottle of wine! He asked why we had just bought a sun Sparc II and around 6 Sparc workstations instead of generic 80386 machines running Linux! I think that was the first I had heard of Linux. My first Linux distro was Slackware in around 1993/4. I remember shuffling dozens of floppy disks in and out of my newly bought home computer. In the lab, 6 years later, we retired the Suns and moved lock stock and barrel to Linux (Red Hat, Suse and then Ubuntu).

I've been a subscriber for about 4-5 years. I run with my co-founder a software company in the Investigations industry that runs on an open-source stack—Spring/Emberjs/Hibernate—mostly deploying to Postgresql.

I think LJ has useful information and is a great way for the Linux community to communicate. As a business, we pick up some useful tips and have contacted some of the advertisers regarding their products also.

I have enjoyed hearing about the internal going ons of the kernal community. I wish I could help those efforts, but we work in the JS/Java world.

LOL. My first distro was Mandrake. Don't shoot me.

I'm a longtime subscriber. I subscribed since issue 2 after scoring the first issue as a door prize at the first meeting of the Sydney Linux users group!

I still subscribe because the magazine still highlights modules, libraries or programs that fall under the radar on web searches or current awareness.

My first distribution was SLS. Then Slackware on 50 f floppies.

My favorite memory is being able to use Linux at work to replace an IBM power aix box. This depended on GNU FORTRAN becoming available. Then being able to write a Python program on a Linux system for autologging an echo sounder and GPS data with real-time echo trace running on a weather-proof laptop!

I have been a Linux Journal reader/subscriber for many many years, ever since I first came across Linux Journal (in print) 25 years ago. I live and work in Aberdeen Scotland.

I have been a fan of Linux since 1993/1994 when I first installed Yggdrasil Linux, eventually moving to SLS linux and then on to Red Hat and Fedora.

I used Linux as my desktop system until I was forced from a work perspective to move to Windows 7 years ago; however, I have used Linux continuously for the last 25 years.

I am still running a number of servers on DigitalOcean and supporting solutions on a number of others for customers, with solutions that have been running for 15+ years.

I have tried to be an advocate of Linux solutions over the years, explaining the virtues and benefits of using Linux, and Linux Journal was instrumental in providing backup and examples of what they could do.

Over the years there have so many good articles in Linux Journal that it is impossible to pick just one, I only hope that you continue to keep up the good work and continue the high standard that you have delivered in the past.

I have been lucky to have used Linux over the past 25 years, and at some point I would like to be able to contribute something back to the Linux community. Time and pressure of work has meant that I have not been able to do this so far.

Please keep up the good work and I will continue to be a subscriber.

I am really glad to celebrate with you. I've been a subscriber since January 2006 (issue #141). I subscribe because an engineer must know a broad spectrum of tools to be able to choose the proper one. My favorite LJ memory is how I could follow an interesting period of web development between 2005 and 2010 with Reuven's great articles. My first distro was Mandrake Linux 7.0 in 2000.

I'm a subcriber since the very first issue (I've attached a picture of a stack of print issues with the first issue on top). I started using Linux from kernel version 0.99p15, installed using 3 Slackware floppy drives. Being over the moon with my personal UNIX system which meant I could use a similar system at home as the SunOS on 68k processor I used at work, I wanted to know everything about Linux. When Linux Journal was announced, I did not hesitate to subscribe.

I've been a subscriber since September 2003. I read a few Linux publications and LJ was the best in my opinion. My favorite LJ memory is the day I learned LJ was coming back! I was very sad to see it disappear a few weeks before. My first distro was Red Hat 3 'Picasso', installed with (damn) floppies!

I'm not sure what you records show...I think I started a subscription as soon as I found your publication existed. Starting an ISP, I was reading as many O'Reilly books with animals on the cover as I could...along with LJ. I self-taught myself Linux (after previously cutting my teeth with SunOS on SPARC stations. I wanted to understand as much as I could about Linux applications, development and what the trends in the Open Source community are. I enjoy reading how Linux can be used with other open source systems to help our company. I have lots of LJ memories, but the only one that I can think of now is the fun articles by Marcel with the food metaphors. My first distro was Slackware 2.3 running Linux kernel 1.2.8. I used a Micron Pentium 133 workstation to run sendmail, named, ftp, apache, RADIUS and pppd to provide dialup service with 8 US Robotics Courier V. Everything modems direct connected on a Comtrol RocketPort RS-232 for our rural dialup ISP.

I can't remember how long I've been a subscriber, but it's been a while—maybe close to 20 years on and off (you'd have to look at your records...lol). I can remember asking my local newsstand operator (Le Signet in Hawkesbury, Ontario—"Signet" is the French word for "Bookmark"—they still operate today) if they would ever carry this obscure magazine called Linux Journal. I used to buy single magazines at first until I subscribed a few years later.

I subscribed because it was the only way to get good information about Linux. Back then, the internet was not what it is today. Getting to read what other people were doing was great. It's still a great resource today.

My favorite LJ memory is receiving my first issue in the mail. Seems so long ago, but it was great. I would get my very own Linux Journal every month! What could be better. For some reason, I remember setting up a lot of things using articles from Linux Journal. I remember setting up KDE, diald (who uses that anymore! And Samba, distcc.

My first distribution was a Slackware (or at least I think it was—I remember a version of 0.99pl17 for the kernel, but don't quote me on the number), installed from floppy images that I had downloaded over the course of a month because the BBS I was downloading it from had daily maximums, and the disk image were rapidly eating at that "quota". I guess for free, I couldn't expect much more than that. I was in college back then, and money was always in short supply. Making all those floppy images was a painful process. Installing proved a challenge because I would get through most of the disks only to get one bad disk near the end and have to redo the disk image. Ah, the memories. I remember buying my first Linux distribution on a trip to Quebec City over the holidays in 1994 while visiting my dad's family. I recall the CDs being in a red multi-cd case but can't remember the name of the company making it. Could be Walnut Creek but I'm not sure. It was a Slackware, of that I'm sure. I was so anxious to go back home because at my grandfather's house, there was no computer at all. When I got home (the four hour drive was a long one!!), I was so nervous creating the the boot and the root disks. Booting from CD wasn't big back then. Picking the right root and boot disk with the correct driver for whatever CD-ROM drive I had—I had this obscure drive that hooked up directly to a SoundBlaster card. Just the fact that this Linux distribution was multi-user was fascinating to me. I was used to the DOS and Windows where multitasking wasn't exactly huge.

Me again. I found which Linux distribution I bought first: It was a Slackware 4-CD set from InfoMagic - Google helped me ;-). It wasn't Walnut Creek as I originally stated. You guys are really taking me down memory lane on this one.

I've been a subscriber for 10+ years because I learn a lot from the articles! Being an avid amateur radio operator, I was thrilled to see issue 189/January 2010. First distro ever was Slackware in 1997.

I've been a subscriber for at least 2 years to gain insight into Linux and the community. My first Linux distro was Mepis.

I would like to let people know that my company Angbert Enterprises is working to get more SMBs to move to Linux not only on the server, but on the desktop. I believe, having been a systems engineer for some large corporations, that 90% of all users in a company could easily be moved to a Linux desktop, with no learning curve. The other 10% are because of strange proprietary applications that need special work to make them work on Linux, such as using Wine, Virtual Machines, or actually still needing a Windows computer.

I'm not sure why LJ would want to feature me because, quite frankly, my skill level in Linux looks to be well below that of the reader that LJ is intended for. I agreed to be on the editorial board of the journal in the hope that I could help with comments and suggestions. I'm happy to continue being on the board and receiving editions of LJ to read and review, but I really don't think I fit the profile of your regular readers. At any rate, that is for you to decide, so here are my answers to your questions.

I've been a subscriber for one year. I enjoy reading anything about Linux that I can learn from, and/or those that inspire me to continue to use Linux and develop my Linux skills. In my case, even as a non-sophisticated Linux user, there are always articles in LJ that do this for me. My favorite LJ memory is the Privacy issue (May 2018). This is something I am concerned about, and the issue was well covered in the featured articles in the May 2018 edition.

SuSE 6.5 was my first distro. I bought it as a boxed set about 20 years ago, just to try this strange operating system called Linux on my Macintosh PowerPC. It was interesting to try, but didn't have much of the kind of software I regularly used to keep me interested. But it planted the idea of using Linux in the back of my head until 2010, when I was ready to try Linux again in the form of Ubuntu. I am now a fully converted Mac user, and I use mainly Ubuntu and Mint on Mac computers.

I am a member of a Linux user group in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. It's great that we have such a group in a city this small!

I think I've been a subscriber from the very beginning. I subscribe for the great tips and articles on Linux goodness. My favorite LJ memory is the first annual disk of The Whole Year. My first distro was Debian.

P.S. my student Warren Togami proposed an ICS499 Directed Studies project to me a while back to create a district called Fedora...I had trouble believing he could get it done in a single semester. It actually needed the summer to get rolling in addition to the original semester.

P.P.S. I also run mirror.ancl.hawaii.edu.

I've subscribed off and on since 1995. Mostly on. Love the regular columnists (e.g., Kyle, Dave, Reuven,...), the kernel gossip and the themed issues. Getting a bunch of free LJs at an SF conference and turning my geek friends onto LJ is my favorite LJ memory. I tried to get Yggdrasil Linux running in 1994, but it wasn't until Slackware 3.0 in 1995 that I finally got a Linux distribution working.

I've been a subscriber for 20+ years. I subscribe to Linux Journal for the education. I always learn something new. The issue about Asterisk sticks in my mind. I liked the idea of beating the phone companies. It felt liberating. I think SUSE was my first distro, but then it was Red Hat, and then for long time it was Gentoo. Now it's Kubuntu.

I've been a subscriber since late 1994. Why: tech content from areas I'm not an expert in. Favorite memory: meeting Phil and Carlie at a UW-Seattle event around late 1996. First distro: Tamu followed quickly by Slackware (Spring 1994).

What a terrific way to celebrate LJ and the community that it spawned! I have bought or subscribed to LJ since 1995. Initially, I subscribed for the community, both the insights offered and the new knowledge conveyed. Nowadays, I subscribe simply to support LJ's continued publication! My favorite LJ memory is back in the day, searching bookstores, waiting for the latest supply-constrained edition to appear, hoping it would not sell out before I found my copy. My first distro was Slackware circa mid-1994 for home use. Debian circa late-1995 on an IBM RS/6000 for a work-related project, that I recall was fun torture!

I've had a subscription since 1997, and I've located, scanned and attached your renewal letter (not email) from April 1998. I discovered your magazine and the similarly ancient German Linux-Magazin at the same time in a bookstore that targeted students of CS and other technical topics. Back then, the internet wasn't what it is today, and Linux information was rare. So after getting and reading and applying a couple copies of both magazines, I sent out my subscription forms.

Why do I read LJ? Well, basically comes down to a different question of "why do I use Linux?" It all started in ca. 1994 when I was frustrated with the comfort of TeXShell (a Turbo-Pascal-like integrated editor for LaTeX). At the university we had HP-UX workstations that could display Emacs, shell and xdvi windows on the same screen! The MS-DOS experience was laughable, in comparison. One of my friends then helped me install Slackware from 5.25" floppies and configure XFree86, and there you go: Emacs, shell, xdvi on my private PC. I later moved to Red Hat and SuSE Linux, much later Kubuntu.

Since then, my relationship with Linux was transformed many times. I wrote some Linux and KDE books. In 2000, I was hired as an editor for a Linux publication. In 2008, I started teaching Linux (and operating system principles) at a university as a freelance lecturer. I wanted to do that professionally, so I had to go back to university to get my PhD (which I did via implementing and documenting ULIX, a teaching operating system loosely based on UNIX). Today I am a computer science professor with operating systems as my main teaching topic; just right now, I'm working on a Docker-based network computing lab for an advanced server administration course. So...I got here because of Linux. Would things have gone very differently if there was no Linux? I don't know. I sure was on an interesting track already, being a CS student in the early 90s. But becoming a writer and a lecturer and a professor in a world where all accessible machines run Windows? I am not so sure. So Linux surely helped a lot. And having access to good documentation helped, too. Which is why I was, am and will remain an LJ subscriber.

What was my best LJ moment? I cannot name a specific issue or article, since I've just been reading too much in the last years, but I guess my best moment was when you said that publication would resume after I already thought you gone for good in December 2017. I've had to say good-bye to too many magazines (including my own: from 2000 to 2018 I was the editor of EasyLinux magazine, which was discontinued half a year ago and won't come back from the dead). So I wish you all the best and another 25 years or more—happy birthday!

I've been a subscriber for two years. Linux Journal has been a great source of information throughout my career, and so I wanted to give a little back. The breadth of topics satisfies both my work and play inner-geek.

My favourite LJ memory is learning that LJ got enough support from the community to keep doing what they do best. My first Linux-based distro would be Mint, but I was using FreeBSD in university long before then if we're talking *nix.

I have subscribed since 1995, when I met one of the original publishers, Phil Hughes, at a Digital Equipment Users Group Symposium (DECUS) in Washington, DC, at the ice cream social. The bad memory of that conference was the first lunch served gave everyone who ate it food poisoning. The best memory was seeing Linus Torvalds speak and meeting him. I had annoyed Jon 'Maddog' Hall about DEC Ultrix print drivers so many times that he remembered me on the elevator at the hotel. On the elevator, I told Jon I was planning on going to the panel discussion with Linus Torvalds instead of the OpenVMS story night (I was a VAX/VMS sysadmin at the time). Jon was concerned how many would show up, but he also told me that afterward a group was taking Linus to the a local brew pub and that I could come along and join them if I came. I attended the panel discussion and then headed with the group over to the brew pub. When all was said and done, as Linus was leaving, I screamed out "Good bye. We love famous people." I was several beers in at that point. Good times.

My first full distribution installed on a personal system was Linux Mint, though I had been logging into various systems in my work life since 1995. I think I have subscribed to Linux Journal for as long as I have as there was always an article or column that applied to something I was doing, even if what I was doing was not Linux-specific.

I've been a subscriber since the first or second year of the paper magazine. I subscribe for the good writing, good information, and for introducing me to Linux things I didn't know about or never expected to actually work. My favority memory is hard to say, but Shawn's article on hacking a cheap Android phone to make it become a mini-WiFi tablet ended up being very useful. Red Hat 2 was my first distro. You bought the book that included a CDROM with the system, then you struggled with getting Slip or PPP working with your modem and ISP to download updates.

I've been a subscriber since the beginning. I still have issue #1 around the house somewhere. Got it at work where there was a small group of Linux users. I like the community, learning about new stuff and articles on building skills or knowledge that I don't yet have.

There have been quite a few times where the content was very timely and helped me out personally or at work. I think the most memorable is the split from printed format—honestly at that point I thought it was the end, but LJ is still here going strong. I used SLS in the beginning. It came, as I recall, in a ~35 Mb tar file. I had to download that at work where there was a fast internet, then split the tarball into sections that would fit on floppy disk so that I could get them home. It was quite a process over a week or so to get it all downloaded, split, re-assembled and untarred so I could begin install the process. It was all worth it once I had it running on a 16 mhz 386.

I always look forward to the new issue, keep up the great work!

I started reading in August 1995 and subscribed shortly after that. I was just getting into Linux and was very excited to see that there were others like me. I loved the articles and look forward to reading them, even to this day.

There are so many good memories of LJ, but I have to say that I really looked forward to the hardware editions. This helped me find good combinations of hardware to use to build really great machines. I have to say that I really miss the printed magazine as well. I just loved being able to physically flip through and bookmark magazines. LJ was definitely my favorite.

My first distro was Slackware that I was able to buy at Microcenter on CD.

I've been a subscriber since 1998. I subscribe for the Linux topics. I'm from Spain, and in 1998, Linux was taking its first steps in my country. My favorite LJ memory is opening my mailbox and finding the magazine (a physical mailbox, of course). First distro was Slackware 3.2.

I've been a subscriber only for a couple of months! I've followed Linux Journal for years, but I never subscribed, which I regret!

I've followed Doc Searls for years, so when I heard from him that Linux Journal was folding, then later that it would continue as an example of how to treat subscribers with respect, I immediately subscribed!

LJ has already been useful to me as I dived back into Linux recently: https://sbw.org/sfflinux.

Doc's recent article "Where There's No Distance or Gravity" really knocked it out of the park for me.

In 1997 I set up a web site on my home server running Red Hat. It was quickly hacked! It's now on a hosted server: http://mira.sbw.org.

I've been a subscriber for less than one year. It's a brilliant source of news and articles about free software My favorite LJ memory is Doc Searls at #freenode live 2018. My first distro was Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon.

I've subscribed on and off for 20 years (or so)—off the shelf as often as a subscription. Early on I subscribed because of a broad desire to devour all things GNU/Linux. Later it was more informative. Overall, though, I think it was the sense of community by reading your journal that proved its best draw.

My favorite LJ memory: I read an article that Jon 'Maddog' Hall, while working at Digital Equipment Corporation, was donating hardware to Linus Torvalds (and team) to help get the kernel ported to Alpha. That exited me to no end (for some reason).

I started with Yggdrasil Linux Oct/Nov 1995, but it was Slackware that I must have installed dozens and dozens of times before I settled eventually on Debian for the next decade.

In the mid-90s I was a database developer and administrator, working on (primarily) Digital and Sun server hardware (there was some mainframe work in there, but I try to forget that part of my life). First thing we did was install GNU tools. The Un*x reality seemed like a dark-dirty subculture of the IT world (to this junior geek)—one that drew my interest. Multi-threading, stability, multi-user—it had things that barely (or didn't) work on Windows desktops or even some Un*x servers (of the time). The first time I saw X run was in the basement of a friend, on a AIX box—it took my breath away. I was planning to try out Minix OS when a peer suggested I look at GNU/Linux instead. I would like to say it was a smooth adoption, but it wasn't—dozens of distros, new terminology, unfamiliar environments, frustrating configurations—I loved it. It was like porn or a drug to me. I learned a lot, and I look back on that time with much fondness. It was the beginning of a long journey.

I've subscribed for 25 years, since the first issue to stay abreast of Linux. My favorite memory is receiving my first issue of LJ and realizing that this open-source Unix was really going somewhere! I deployed Linux workstations to replace Sun workstations at Texas Instruments at that time, saving thousands of dollars. I was also characterizing the Intel Pentium microprocessor, assisting Linus with details of Linux TLB handling. Fun times! First distro was Soft Landing Systems (SLS).

I've been a subscriber for about one year. There are two main reasons why I am a subscriber of Linux Journal. First, I am a digital freedom supporter. When I learned that WikiLeaks revealed that the LJ subscribers were profiled, I immediately became one. I was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in a society severely damaged by the lack of privacy, profiling, censorship, the absence of freedom, and constant monitoring by the government (through your own neighbors, who were also scared). My parents and grandparents have always been afraid of expressing their opinion or "doing something wrong" because they constantly experienced the "watchful eye" of the oppressing government. Being raised in this toxic environment, I promised to myself to never be afraid of being who I am, expressing my opinion, and decide for myself what to do and what to read. I am a crypto-punk, but not a digital anarchist. Although I would have never done what Snowden or Manning did, I strongly believe that freedom and privacy are superior to national security or corporate interests. I believe that freedom and privacy, in the long-term perspective, are the main contributors to secure government and thriving businesses. As a person born in the USSR, I also witnessed the deteriorating power of internal espionage, profiling, privacy violation, censorship and freedom of speech. It was not Snowden who undermined the national security of the United States. It was the NSA who did it! The editorial opinion of Linux Journal seems to be close to mine, so this is the first reason why I subscribed.

Second, I saw the word BLOCKCHAIN on the cover of one of the issues of LJ. I am a graduate PhD student researching blockchain, and I hoard all beyond-hype information about blockchain. Also, I am a full-time desktop Linux user, so I determined that LJ could be helpful for my research or optimization of my workflow as a Linux user.

My favorite LJ memory: I liked the series of articles about ncurses programming. I always wanted to learn it, but existing tutorials looked too time-consuming for me.

My first distro was Mandrake Linux 7.0 on four CD disks with kernel 2.2.14-15. (Jeez, I still remember the version of my first kernel!) I immediately fell in love with it, and I am still in love with Linux.

I think I've subscribed for 15 years or so.

I subscribe because I use Linux every day, in the servers I manage and in my personal desktop and laptop computers, and I like to know what's going on with Linux development.

I have learned a lot of new things reading LJ, and I have helped friends sharing some articles about open source apps, including ones that work also in other OSes.

I am a good friend of Miguel de Icaza, and he sent me maybe 10 or 12 diskettes with Linux and helped me over the phone to install it (version 0.x). After that, I think I bought the Yggdrasil distribution. Later I switched to Red Hat, then to Debian, and right now, I use CentOS on the servers, and after a couple years of using Mint, I'm back using Ubuntu Mate on my personal computers, including a couple Mac computers.

Thanks for a great magazine and congratulations on your first 25 years.

I'm really glad for your 25th anniversary and looking forward to the next 25! While I'm a LJ newbie, I've used Linux for quite some time. I've been a subscriber for around one year. I subscribe because I really love Linux, and I find it very important to support a publication covering this topic. Besides that, LJ provides a good addition to the German Linux Magazin, which I subscribe to as well.

My favorite LJ memory is reading the first issue after I subscribed and discovering that Glyn Moody is an author, as I loved the Rebel Code book from him.

My first distro? That would be S.u.S.E 4.2 in 1996.