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.
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 😛
Let’s not downvote the poor guy just because we lost him to Apple. The comment is on topic and people are allowed to make different choices/mistakes 😉
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.
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 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 OpenBSD on my desktop since about 2006ish.
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.
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.
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 switched 2010 from Windows to Linux.
- Ubuntu (2010)
- Linux Mint (2012)
- Arch Linux (2020)
I have been using the Debian-based Open Media Vault on my home server for… probably four, five years now, at first just for a cheap dumb “NAS”, which has slowly featurecrept itself into being my personal replacement for damn near everything except E-Mail.
On my daily driver(s) though… tough to say, because I was distribution-hopping for a while. But currently, I seem to have found my home on Arch. I had tried Ubuntu, Linux Mint and a few others every now and then, but at the time always went back to Windows for one reason or another.
But… ironically, since I am now working for a Microsoft Partner and thus play a lot less games and no longer have to send out applications or use specific tools for vocational school or uni or something, I am no longer bound to Windows in my time off, so I have been using Manjaro for a few months at first, before I reinstalled and went to Arch proper.
Debian (testing) at least since 2018 and I don’t plan to switch. Before that I was hopping a bit between ubuntu based distros and manjaro. On servers I always use debian stable.
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.
I’m not much of a distro-hopper. I think I’ve been on just four distros on my daily-driving desktop & laptop since about 1999:
- RedHat (around 1999, starting with 6.0)
- Mandrake (around 2001?)
- Ubuntu (around 2006)
- Arch Linux (around 2012 - today), and no intention to hop. In fact, I recently bought a new PC and installed Arch again. On the previous machine, I installed it once and it rolled nicely its entire lifetime.
My personal server has been running Ubuntu LTS for ages, I might have run debian a long time ago, but I’m not sure anymore. Nowadays I run a container setup, and those are running on Alpine Linux.
