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?
MX and Opensuse
I’ve been using OpenBSD on my desktop since about 2006ish.
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 :/
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.
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.
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 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’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 been using Linux Mint (Cinnamon) as my only operating system since 2016. No dual booting.
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.
For servers I’ve been using Ubuntu Server since ~2016. For my desktop I used Ubuntu up to 2019 when I switched to Arch.
