This is kind of the anti-distro hopping thread. How long have you stayed on a single Linux distribution for your main PC? What about servers?
I’ve been on Debian on and off since 2021, but finally committed to the platform since April of this year.
Before that I was on OpenBSD from 2011 - 2021 for my desktop.
Prior to that, FreeBSD for many years, followed by a few years of distro-hopping various Linux distros (Slackware, Arch, Fedora, simplyMEPIS, and ZenWalk from memory).
How long have you been on your distribution? Do we have anybody here who has been on their current distro for more than a decade?
My main desktop has been upgraded continuously from RHL5 (no E) in ~1999 to Fedora 38 today.
Well, almost continuously. I’ve done at least one fresh install, when I switched from 32-bit to 64-bit hardware.
Edit: I have used a lot of other distros on other boxes, both physical and virtual - I’ve just stuck with Fedora on that one.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s surprisingly stable for a rolling release distro.
Yes, I was a distro hopper up until I tried Tumbleweed for the first time. Been using it for two years now, hopped around for a year prior.
Couldn’t agree more. Probably because they have some automatic QA going on on their CI and if some package does something wrong that this QA catches the package does not get included into update until it passes. Also if there would be something that would go wrong you still have automatic BTRFS snapshots created before and after and update and a boot entry automatically added to GRUB so you could simply reboot into old working state in such an unfortunate case.
I distro hopped a lot since installing a retail red hat box bought at the store in 199something.
It’s now more than 10 years that I basically only run Debian (on all my servers) and Gentoo/funtoo (on my workstations). For my partner and relatives, I install only Mint because it lacks all the cool gadgets, but it’s stable as a rock, especially on notebooks, and still reminds them of Windows.
I tried Arch, btw. Nice wiki, horrible package management.
I tried Pop_OS, it’s fun, it’s fine, it’s fresh, but tends to self-destruct if I push it too much.
I loved Elementary OS, it’s really promising but always gave me the feeling to run a beta OS.
I installed Arch in 2004, and I haven’t hopped since. I was trapped in Ubuntu for a short while once, when I had a new work laptop where for some reason I couldn’t get Arch installed, but when I tried again a couple of months later, it all worked. So I guess the answer is: for 19 years.
openSUSE Tumbleweed KDE since 2019, it never breaks and if you break it you can easily roll back. Yes, there are a lot of updates, but I have a secondary system that I upgrade only once every six months and it works like a charm!
Using Arch on various AMD64 systems since 2016, and I am not planning to change that.
On my Raspberry Pi I tried Arch Linux ARM but thanks to various small problems I distro-hopped to Raspberry Pi OS.
Workstations: I’ve been using Fedora since 2014, so coming up on a decade. Runner up would be Arch for about three years from 2011-2014. Before that it was a blur of distro hopping.
Servers: Been using a combination of RHEL and CentOS since 2011, so about twelve years. And yes, I’m still using CentOS even though it’s no longer a rebuild of RHEL. I actually think it’s better now, because bugs can actually be fixed instead of being closed as “reproducible on RHEL”.
I’ve had an HP Dev One with Pop!_OS for right about a year now. I’ve done plenty of hopping and testing of other distributions prior to last year, but started with Ubuntu in 2009/2010 and have always felt most comfortable with Debian based OSs.
On servers I’ve stuck with Ubuntu LTS’s since 2017. They’ve always been rock solid, even if the 2-4 year upgrade can be time consuming, it’s not often enough for me to try something else. The support and documentation is excellent. I find it hard to think of a single reason to even try something else.
On the desktop I probably have spent most time on Ubuntu, or Ubuntu derivative like Kubuntu, but I now use EndeavourOS and I have no plans to switch or hop or try anything else. So I’ll likely end up on Endeavour far longer.
Archlinux. Many years ago, not sure exactly when, but more than 10years. Last distro I really used before Arch was ZenWalk, slackware based. Arch was the only one that after many tries and over the years remains the most consistent, simple and reliable that I can manage without much effort.
After using on my personal computers Arch I still tried and used on the work machines Ubuntu lts releases. It gave so much problems that I just now use Arch everywhere and anytime I get a new work machine it’s what gets installed too.
I have to say that I was a serious heavy distro hoper back in the days and tried basically everything that existed. Just not gentoo. But fedoras, mandrakes, mandrivas, knopix, slackware, bsd, suse, etc, I regularly spent time with them all and was changing a lot and tried many new releases. The longest I’ve been with a distro was ZenWalk, more than a year or 2 and then Arch appeared on my radar and once I jumped ship, never got the need for anything else.
Edit: Checked some math I think I use arch more than 15years now.
I’ve been on Yggdrasil Linux since 1993. Now, get off my lawn, you punks!
My one desktop is 5 years on Manjaro now.
Before that I had Ubuntu for 8 years across several installs, although I also dual-booted Windows back then.
But I’ve had a freeBSD file server for at least 20.
UFS? Or did you migrate to zfs at some point?
I’ve been using OpenBSD on my desktop since about 2006ish.
Archlinux since 2009
So 14 yearsI’ve been on Ubuntu ever since I switched to Linux 7 months ago, tbh I don’t understand distro-hopping. I’m not any tech wizard, and Ubuntu fulfills all my criteria: worked out of the box, worked faster than Windows, hasn’t broken yet 👍
All I do is run Firefox and Steam on my laptop anyways :/
