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 used Kububtu between 2008 and around 2013, then got so fed up with KDE4 bugs I switched to Xubuntu, and am using that ever since.
So that’s 10 or 15 years depending how you count.
When I want to play, I start a VM, base OS needs to be rock solid.
KDE 4 really, really set the Linux desktop back for years, at a time where we could have made a strong push into the mainstream market.
Yeah, it looked really modern and was great when it worked, which wasn’t too often.
@unix_joe fedora and arch. Because anything Ubuntu based kinda sucks.
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.
Tumbleweed is still the best rolling release distro I have tried, but Debian 12 is a temptation almost too good to pass up on. I have been using more and more flatpaks anyways (gotta prepare myself for eventually switching to some immutable distro - I think they need a bit more time to be ready)
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.
I used it on my gaming rig for about a few months before giving up due to frustrations with nvidia 😔. I guess it’s not considered distro hopping because I was forced to hop back to windows. Never had any other issues besides nvidia. I’ve only ever used rolling release distros and the problems I had to deal with on Arch for example never came up in Tumbleweed.
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’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 been hopping between Gentoo and Arch for at least a decade and you can’t stop me from doing it again >:P
(Currently using Arch on two systems, bytheway :'D Already thinking of hopping back to Gentoo on the desky one. Maybe try Funtoo. Unless there’s a Funthree :thinkyface: ;P )
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.
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As my personal day-tp-day system, It looks like 8 years of Ubuntu. I have a file server that just will not die that’s been running Ubuntu LTS since 2008 though.
Here’s my Distro journey:
1996-1997 - Debian (Still dual booting Windows) 1997-2002 - RedHat Desktop 5.0-7.3 (Linux became my main day-to-day OS!) 2002-2003 - Crux 2003-2008 - Gentoo 2008-2012 - Ubuntu / Ubuntu LTS 2012-2014 - Mint 2014-2022 - Ubuntu / Ubuntu LTS / Xubuntu (I switched back to Ubuntu as my personal OS since I had deployed Ubuntu to over 100 systems at work, and I had a little netbook with Xubuntu) 2022-???? - LMDE 5 (Linux Mint - Debian Edition)Still loving LMDE.
I’ve been using OpenBSD on my desktop since about 2006ish.
Pop os, for well over a year, though i wanna switch to arch, just gotta get my nas setup first, so i can move my pirateted movies and roms, and then i just gotta get the arch iso to actually work, plenty of other Linux distribution isos work, just not arch, even most arch based isos work, the reason why I’m only talking about isos is that im just building a big collection of isos but yea pop os it great just looking to change so i can get a lot more experience with Linux
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’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.
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 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).
