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.
MX and Opensuse
I’ve been on Fedora Linux for almost a year now. Considering that I started using Linux when the pandemic started, you can figure out that it’s my distro of choice now. Also, I like that Fedora is, for the most part, quite developer friendly and had great packages and software installed when I first started using it.
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.
I’ve been using OpenBSD on my desktop since about 2006ish.
Been on Artix Linux for about 3 years. Occasionally there’s a package that breaks, but nothing serious. Been very happy with a minimal environment using Bspwm/sxhkd and the st terminal mainly.
Well there’s one I haven’t heard of yet. I last used Arch Linux about 15 years ago, before systemd was a thing. I assume this is a continuation of what Arch used to be?
More or less. It’s the only distro with quite a few options for init out of the box. Runit, s6, OpenRC, dinit. No sysV. Their implementation of runit in particular is far better than Devuan, who simply wrapped runit as a service wrapper around sysV.
They have had to do quite a few work around a to get the different init systems working imho, and i see why the guys over at Debian roughly a decade back had such a lengthy email discussion about not wanting to support all the inits.
I’m super grateful to the guys over there doing the hard work, but it obviously wouldn’t be possible without the upstream Arch team. Runit is awesome though, imho.
I was on the same distro for ~10 years, roughly 2010-2020, before I got pulled into the “Apple ecosystem”. (Still use Linux on all my servers, though!)
I use(d) Arch, btw 😛
Two years, Arch. Idk why but it feels comfy. Rolling release for the most up to date bugs + the AUR 👌🏼
@unix_joe fedora and arch. Because anything Ubuntu based kinda sucks.
Workstation: Ubuntu approximately 18 years. (2004)
Servers: Debian approximately 25 years. (1998)
I’ve been on Yggdrasil Linux since 1993. Now, get off my lawn, you punks!
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 :/
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’ve only really used Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu (in that order!), each for years at a time over the past two decades. I suppose it shows how progessively fewer fucks I give about the inner workings of the system.
I also tried to install a copy of… TurboLinux 6, I think? that I got from a Ham Radio swap meet as a kid sometime in the '90s, but I never got it to work.
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.
