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?

    • michael@kbin.social
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • KelsonV@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 years ago

    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.

      • Gatsby@lemm.ee
        1·
        2 years ago

        What are the selling points on endeavour over Manjaro? Or endeavourOS over arch?

        I’ve been on Manjaro a hot minute, and if I were to switch, I think I’d just go to arch. But I don’t personally know anything about EndeavourOS

    • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 years ago

      Right, it’s since woody for me as well. I’ve periodically interacted with Redhat for particular work tasks, but for my installations it’s been Debian stable for servers + machines that are vital for me, and sid for personal or development machines, for over 20 years. This whole question is a little strange to me. Do people really replace their OS of choice more often than a few times per lifetime (when they discover something better than they knew about before)?

    • unix84@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • s_s@lemmy.one
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Nerdfest@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • ScorpiosRevenge@lemmy.one
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • deliriousn0mad@feddit.it
    2·
    2 years ago

    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!

  • pascal@lemm.ee
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Zaphodquixote@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    2 years ago

    Ahhh, when did Windows 10 come out? I’ve been on mint since then, though I’ve tried live discs/drives of the major distros here and there. I like mint, it works for me.