Looking Back at (Almost) 20 Years of Tux Machines
This coming spring (or early summer) Tux Machines officially turns 20. This week we've rapidly migrated all the content, including the very first Drupal nodes, to this Debian 12 server. We've hopefully preserved the site's history for many years to come.
My wife and I took over the site 10 years ago. It was in the later months of 2013 that Susan Linton sold it to us for $1000 (not a high price, but she knew she would leave it in good hands). Not much has changed since then. We still do "today's howtos", we just use another system due to the fast ageing of Drupal (with frequent update cycles that break extensions and more). Tux Machines is Susan's creation, but we've now spent 10 years running it as well. We also developed a whole new static site generator for it, complete with Gemini support. Among the "Linux news sites" we're the first to have done so.
Susan was in touch with us as recently as this year. She's still watching and she's still being contacted by readers of Tux Machines.
If the World Wide Web does not last another 20 years, we're hoping to have at least migrated all the work (galleries, reviews, news) to some other format/protocols such as GemText/Gemini. It's like a digital library, documenting the history of GNU/Linux users. While there are quite a few "Linux" sites older than Tux Machines (Phoronix is the same age), not many of them are active anymore. LWN is still active, but Linux Journal and Linux.com only post the habitual 'token' post to give a sign of life.
PCLinuxOS, which was at the root of Tux Machines, is still going. It still has a healthy community. GNU/Linux as a whole is still growing.
We're gratified to have come this far and wish to thank longtime readers.