Hmm, lots of questions... OK, I'll bite. Feel free to ignore anything you don't like
Hudzilla wrote:1) The LXF Interview. We've interviewed Damian Conway, Nat Friedman, Miguel De Icaza, Stephen Tweedie, Michael Robertson, Matthias Ettrich, and others - what do you think? Do you care what the community leaders think? Are we asking the right kinds of questions? Are there people you think we've missed?
The interviews are interesting. The questions seem about right - not too sycophantic, and sufficiently technical without making the article boring to those who are not deeply involved in the interviewee's specialisation. Suggestions for future interviews : Bruce Perens, Jon 'maddog' Hall, Linus himself, and maybe even RMS. And if you want some comic relief in there, how about Darl McBride (ask him specifically which bits of Linux are covered by the SCOsource license he wants us all to buy)

Hudzilla wrote:2) The Versus features. These are really just a bit of fun to get people thinking about why /they/ prefer KDE to Gnome (or vice versa), etc. Do you see them as fun, or just page filler you don't care about? Do you find yourself usually agreeing with one person in the argument, or is it a mix? Are there other topics you'd like to see covered?
It's fun to see people arguing polar opposites. I suspect that most people, like myself, are more pragmatic and will use whatever is best for the job in hand. But by having the extremes argued you often get an appreciation of why some tools are better than others for a particular job.
Hudzilla wrote:3) What on Earth. We try to keep the WoE articles covering new topics that we hope will inspire or otherwise interest you, backing the text up with off-the-wall illustration. What do you think of our previous topics? Are we going into enough depth? Should we go back over some of the older WoEs to cater for people who didn't buy the old issues?
I find these interesting when they cover things I haven't used before. Rather than going back over some of the old ones, why not turn them into a section on the web site (say a couple of months after they appear in the mag) ? Or maybe even produce a special publication - "Linux Format : What on Earth ?" - although you might want to wait until you get a few more to make it worth doing.
Hudzilla wrote:4) Cover features. It's always our goal to make a punchy cover feature that will grab you and make you want to read, varying between practical ("Network Everything"), hardware ("64-bit or Bust"), and theoretical ("Xen"). Are we hitting that goal? Are our cover features the right length/too long/too short? What kind of feature do you prefer? Are our choices of topics just plain dull?
I think that overall you're getting it about right. I would have liked more info in the Xen article, especially on which distros it will & won't play nicely with. But some of the others seem a little long. You can't please all of the people all of the time. It's very rare that I skim over any of this section when reading the mag.
Hudzilla wrote:5) Tutorials. These are one of the core parts of the magazine, and ultimately we feel that the tutorials are a primary purchase decision maker for readers. What do you think about our current crop of tutorials? Do you prefer long series, like PHP and Gimp, or shorter series, like Perl and Emacs? Should we expand the size of our coverage, or is it about right? Are there particular topics that we're missing?
Again, whatever you do you won't please everybody. I really enjoyed "Troutwars", and was a little disappointed when it fizzled out - you seemed to get bored with it in the last part. I thought it had about 2 more articles left in it. The ongoing GIMP series still produces some interesting (to me) stuff from time to time, even though this is not a particular area of interest to me. PHP is not of any great interest to me at the moment, but who knows what might come up next week to cause me to reach for my LXF archive...
Overall, I think you've got it about right.
It might be nice if you could get someone to do a series on C++, starting right from the beginning and explaining objects & classes along the way. As a long-time Fortran & C programmer I'm still a bit hazy on this object-orientated stuff

Hudzilla wrote:5) Art. It's the job of the LXF art team to produce high-impact designs that make the magazine pleasing to read, entertaining, and also more informative than it would have been with plain text. What do you think of the layout in LXF? Are our cover designs attractive and interesting? Do the stock photos annoy rather than help? How much do you love/hate the colour purple used in our tutorials?
Another Question 5 ???
My favourite LXF covers are still from the very early days - Tux surfing on a wave of ethernet cables (LXF05) and Tux as Che Guevara (LXF01).
The recent designs are OK... I don't hate them, and I'm sure I couldn't do any better, but I'm more interested in what's inside the mag than what's on the cover (I know, the covers are important for getting non-subscriber sales, but that doesn't apply to me).
As to the purple, it's OK. At least it's better than the dreadful orange of the old website

Hudzilla wrote:6) Production. We have two full-time people working to correct errors in the magazine, both technical and grammatical. Would you agree that the number of mistakes in the magazine has declined drastically? Do you notice all the effort they put in to italicize program names, to bold commands, etc? Do you appreciate our attempts to add humour in places? (you're welcome to respond with "what humour?", but it'll make us cry)
I didn't notice that many mistakes in the mag to start with...
The level of humour is about right for a technical mag. A bit lame in places, definitely corny, but unobtrusive. Just enough to keep you interested in the boring but essential bits. After all, you're not trying to publish the Beano...
Hudzilla wrote:7) Cover discs. For us, the cover discs are the absolute core of the magazine - the embodiment of our push to promote free software. Do you use your discs, or put them away in a cupboard? Do you like getting a new distro each month to try, or would you prefer programs for your existing distro?
I have my cover disks on a shelf at work. Most of them have never been out of their cases.
But that doesn't mean I want you to stop producing them. I've tried several distros - it was SuSE 7.0 from the coverdisks that finally persuaded me to use Linux for more than just a cheap Solaris/AIX/HPUX substitute for testing our UNIX programs and writing shell scripts. Thanks to that, I've bought box sets of SuSE 7.2, 8.2 & 9.2. I'm intending to try Gentoo on my AMD64 box later this summer, so I really appreciate the latest coverdisk. I have a Win2k box that dual boots with Fedora Core 3 thanks to the LXF coverdisks. And I always burn myself a new Knoppix CD when you include it - that's saved my bacon more than once !
Like with the PHP tutorials, the coverdisks are a useful resource. You never know when they might be useful. Even the old distros, which will often install on machines that are too limited for the latest bloatware.
Again, I think you've got the balance between distros and apps about right.
Hudzilla wrote:
Mag involvement. Recently we've been working hard to add ways for you to voice your opinions in the magazine - "Over to you" in the Roundup verdicts, email addresses at the bottom of each column, etc. Do you care about these opportunities, or would you rather we just stuck with what we were doing?
I think the traditional ways of voicing opinions (letters page, Magazine section of the forums) are fine. Just plug them at the end of each article.
Hudzilla wrote:9) Reviews. In the very latest issues we've been adding more elements to our reviews - walkthrough boxes, annotations, and in the very latest issue (LXF68) new "Graham says" and "Nick says" boxes. Do you feel these add extra value to the reviews? Should we run more reviews? Would you like to see more hardware reviews?
The reviews are usually pretty good. The second opinion (Graham/Nick says) could be valuable provided that they are relevant and succinct. More hardware reviews would always be welcome - why not take a different printer or scanner each month and review it in conjunction with whatever distro you have on the coverdisk, including a blow-by-blow account of how to get the two to work together.
Overall, I like the way the magazine is going. I renewed my subscription again earlier this year, and nothing I've seen recently will stop me doing the same next year (and that's what you really want to hear, isn't it

)