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.
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?
Thanks to this post i just realized I’ve been using arch for 9 years. I did hop DEs a bunch up till about 3 years ago when i settled for plasma on Wayland (on? with? Idk), but the arch ecosystem has proven the perfect balance of flexibility and stability (yes i find arch very stable). Before arch i distro hopped almost annually since about 2006.
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.
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.
I’m pretty new to Linux, committed to it 2021 and last changed to EndeavorOS (basically an arch installer + a few quality of life packages) around one and a half years ago. It recently broke on my desktop (btrfs disk full, though it didn’t show as full, during update. And my snapshots were setup incorrectly). Looking into trying out NixOS on it now, my Laptop will stay EndeavorOS for the foreseeable future though.
I’ve settled on Ubuntu in 2008, but jumped between Gnome, KDE, Unity and LXDE. Then I got a Steam Deck last year and it became my main machine, so now I am not only with its Arch based OS, but I a secondary Arch SD card that I occasionally boot, if I need something not immediately available in SteamOS.
Servers? Debian Since 2019.
I stopped having time (or inclination) to mess around with multiple distributions after getting out of college and into real life. So… Since at least about 2002, with Debian.
Wow, more than 20 years on the same OS.
I would have stayed with FreeBSD or OpenBSD but eventually my requirements outgrew what they could provide.
Now I’m on Debian. You chose … wisely.
Once I fully embraced the DontBreakDebian way of doing things, I haven’t looked back. I have 3 desktops and 3 laptops on cycles of testing, stable, and testing again depending on the current state of the testing distro. Debian + Flatpak meets most of my needs. Also, not having the latest, shiniest version isn’t always a bad thing. I have only had one major item break in testing and it was fixed within 3 days.
Workstation: Ubuntu approximately 18 years. (2004)
Servers: Debian approximately 25 years. (1998)
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.
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.
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).
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 agree on pretty much all of this. I love Pop, so psyched for COSMIC DE. I now run it on all my machines (except for Raspberry Pi OS on my RasPis and EndeavourOS on my old PC).
Package Management on Arch is not my cup of tea. But EndeavourOS is great for what I need it to do (make old PC feel like slightly less old PC).
Mint is awesome. If I have to recommend a distro to someone who is not that knowledgeable, I give them Mint and a quick rundown on how it works. Mint is awesome.
Sams Teach Yourself Linux in 24 hours. Christmas 1998. Red Hat Linux 5.2.
I upgraded a struggling 486 from Windows 95 OSR2.1 to Red Hat and Afterstep, and never really looked back.
Afterstep
Oh man that was such a cool UI, the best clone of NeXTStep for Linux. But configuring the menus by hand was annoying. :)
Been disto-hopping a lot before ending up in openSUSE Tumbleweed (with KDE Plasma desktop). Now using it for about 6 years as my main desktop/laptop distro.
I dabbled with Linux/Unix (Suse, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, Arch, NetBSD, a little Solaris, a couple of those long-dead floppy/livecd/liveusb systems… and some less-unix things like BeOS) starting in about 1998 and slowly moved fully over to Linux as the daily driver. My usual distro for personal machines has been Arch since about 2004, though I’ve typically had *buntu, and/or CentOS (starting at cAos, now migrating to Rocky) machines for some things I do professionally, and at least one personal Debian server.
I did a lot of environment hopping early on, but settled on XFCE from about 2007-2017, then KDE from about 2017-current once Plasma5 got its resource consumption under control. I’ve been playing with Hyprland a little bit recently, just because it’s the least-broken way to fiddle with a Wayland environment I’ve found, but I like floating+snapping better than tiling so I doubt it’ll become my daily driver.
I think my first Arch install was off 0.2 or 0.3 media in mid-2002, and there are probably only a month or two in that time that I haven’t had at least one Arch box, so that’s two decades.
