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?

    • michael@kbin.social
      5·
      3 years ago

      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.

    • Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 years ago

      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.

  • KelsonV@lemmy.world
    4·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • oldfart@lemm.ee
    3·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • runningman@lemmy.one
    2·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • tristramr@lemm.ee
    2·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • ILurkAndIKnowThings@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 years ago

      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.

  • Justaregulardude2001@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • ckeen@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    20+ years on openbsd and debian evenly spread out on different machines, also 5+ years of arch usage.

  • Nerdfest@kbin.social
    2·
    3 years ago

    Been using Ubuntu, or more recently, Kubuntu since 2006. Not sure that counts as a distro change. Can’t say enough good things about KDE these days though.

    • unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      1·
      3 years ago

      I remember trying and liking the last KDE with 3.5x around that time. There was a .deb to install the Kickoff menu from openSUSE. Solid, ruined by the 4.0 transition. Good times.

  • Uno@monyet.cc
    2·
    3 years ago

    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 :/

  • eyolf@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 years ago

    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.