Funny, here in Europe there are plenty of those on sale, so apparently people do still buy them.

Not in my European country at least. I haven't see a magazine with CD-ROM in years. And most people don't have a cd-dom reader anymore

Here are a couple for you,

https://www.linux-magazin.de

https://www.linuxformat.com/

The argument isn’t that they don’t exist or are not published, it’s that they are not published widely.

Given that the circulation for Linuxformat was just 19,000 in 2014, it seems that that number backs up the position that you wouldn’t find this at a street level vendor.

I would call most shopping mall surfaces and train station newstands, street level.

And what do you suppose is the ratio between train stations + shopping malls vs actual street level tobacco and magazine stands/shops is in most European countries? 1 to 700? 1 to 1000?

Any way, the whole argument is redundant. Go head to your nearest newsagent and see if they stock it. If you live on top of a train station or a supermarket then you’re due both congratulations and commiserations.

For everyone else… you can’t buy them at your nearest kiosk.

Plenty of people can buy them, even at my tiny town back home, that is a little more than "everyone else".

That wasn’t my point at all. They are specialist magazines stocked my particular places.

Because it’s not 2007, no matter how hard you wish it to be.

Street level magazine kiosks sell magazines with up to date Linux kernel CD roms? That’s a lie. I’ve literally never seen that anywhere in Europe in the last decade. You might be able to find them in specialist shops or larger supermarkets, as you can in the UK, but street level kiosks? Get real.

I'm in france, I regularly buy one of those when I take the train lol.

We have quite a bit of choice and they all have recent-ish issues: https://www.journaux.fr/linux_informatique_1_0_130.html and you can find at least a couple of them in most kiosks ; at least Linux Identity always comes with a physical disk