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?
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.
How long? I remember seeing some people have used it since the mid-2010’s on the same install.
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.
Archlinux since 2009
So 14 yearsMy 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.
Been on Manjaro i3wm edition since 2018
I originally started with Knoppix in 1998 used that unitl i9 switched to ubuntu warty warthog and following versions until unity came out in then I switched to mint as unity constantly crashed my machine. stayed with mint for like 5 years, then moved to fedora for a year, switched to tumbleweed because I got tired of the SELinux in fedora causing issues.
Been on endeavourOS for a year now, and if i do decide to migrate a gain I will be going full vanilla arch.
What would be the difference between endeavor OS and vanilla arch?
Just the setup, or is there more to it?
I’ve been using openSUSE since it’s early days when it was S.u.S.E. I started using it in the spring of 1998… so what, 25 years? I’ve used other distros on a second machine, but my main machine has always been SuSE in some form or another. Today it’s openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Probably like half a year on Mint. Don’t know for certain.
I’m currently on Tumbleweed which is pretty good, though I do have some minor issues which make me want to just switch to Debian. I do work on this machine, so even minor issues are pretty damn annoying for me.Yeah, I gave openSUSE Tumbleweed an honest try. Even put the sticker on my daily laptop. But it was annoying enough at just the most inconvenient times to get work done. Things like codec repos not being in sync, or the times that my wifi stopped working after an update (turned out to be a problem with KDEWallet).
When Debian bookworm updated to the latest KDE Plasma, I decided to go there and stay, because it was KDE that I was after, not the rolling release or anything tumbleweed specific. So now I am locked in to a stable system for the next two years, and the flatpaks let me have newer Firefox and Thunderbirds.
I started with Linux like many, I guess, by distro hopping. My first experience was with Knoppix in the late 2000s (because I didn’t know what a live CD was), then I tried OpenSuse, went on to Fedora (is SELinux still such a pain in the ass as it was back then?) and then to Kubuntu.
If I remember correctly I switched to Arch some time after Plasma 4 came out. About 11 years ago. It was, back then, one of the only distributions that shipped the newest stock KDE that “just worked”. Actually that might be wrong, but I didn’t know what I was doing with Linux anyways and somehow I liked Arch enough to stay. I used it at home, for work (software development) and at college. And it serves me well in all those areas (minus some minor hiccups).
It’s still fulfilling my needs but lately I’ve been flirting with NixOS. I might change my daily driver once I get a new laptop (still rocking a Thinkpad T430 from 2012 but it’s starting to show its age).
Workstation: Ubuntu approximately 18 years. (2004)
Servers: Debian approximately 25 years. (1998)
Wow, probably the winner. 25 years is really cool, such a long time for one distro.
In 1998 I tried Red Hat 5.2, but then switched to Slackware, and ended up on FreeBSD since it was like a better Slackware. I must have been all of 12-13 years old.
I admit I never even tried Debian until Lenny, and then went back to OpenBSD.
I’m on Debian since 2012 and before that it was Ubuntu from 2008 to 2012
I’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 :/
Linuxmint here for 14yrs or so. Hopped around a lot but have been using LM as my primary OS and daily driver for personal, work AND gaming. (proton is a god send)
EDIT - to clarify I’ve been consistently on LM now for about 3yrs, not too bad.
Manjaro ended my distro hopping itch +10 years ago. I occasionally test distros in VM, but nothing has made me want to switch so far.
Started on Mint properly in about 2019, but hopped around a little via Manjaro, Garuda, Endeavour and finally came back to Mint full time. These days if I want to try another distro I just install on a separate disk and leave my Mint as my every day install. So full time on Mint since about 2021.
I have been trying Fedora as my secondary too.
Been using Ubuntu, or more recently, Kubuntu since 2006. Not sure that counts as a distro change. Can’t say enough good things about KDE these days though.
I remember trying and liking the last KDE with 3.5x around that time. There was a .deb to install the Kickoff menu from openSUSE. Solid, ruined by the 4.0 transition. Good times.
