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?
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.
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.
How long? I remember seeing some people have used it since the mid-2010’s on the same install.
Workstation: Ubuntu approximately 18 years. (2004)
Servers: Debian approximately 25 years. (1998)
Wow, probably the winner. 25 years is really cool, such a long time for one distro.
In 1998 I tried Red Hat 5.2, but then switched to Slackware, and ended up on FreeBSD since it was like a better Slackware. I must have been all of 12-13 years old.
I admit I never even tried Debian until Lenny, and then went back to OpenBSD.
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.
I agree on pretty much all of this. I love Pop, so psyched for COSMIC DE. I now run it on all my machines (except for Raspberry Pi OS on my RasPis and EndeavourOS on my old PC).
Package Management on Arch is not my cup of tea. But EndeavourOS is great for what I need it to do (make old PC feel like slightly less old PC).
Mint is awesome. If I have to recommend a distro to someone who is not that knowledgeable, I give them Mint and a quick rundown on how it works. Mint is awesome.
Can I suggest you DietPi for your Raspberries? It’s basically Debian, but it’s tweaked to not consume your SD card too much.
Sams Teach Yourself Linux in 24 hours. Christmas 1998. Red Hat Linux 5.2.
I upgraded a struggling 486 from Windows 95 OSR2.1 to Red Hat and Afterstep, and never really looked back.
I’ve been on Yggdrasil Linux since 1993. Now, get off my lawn, you punks!
We all have, some form or anothers
I’ve been using debian since around 1995 or so. Guess I’m coming up on 30 years of using debian. Heh. I believe it was the pre 1.0 version, on the 1.x kernel line and using the pre-elf binary format. I remember that there wasn’t an installer - a friend had gotten it cobbled together, and we installed my 80mb hard drive into his computer and manually copied stuff over until it “worked”. I’ve been using it ever since. I just installed debian bullseye on a new laptop on Friday.
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’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 really enjoyed mint XFCE. I originally started with cinnamon, then tried XFCE, but then bounced to other light weight distributions (lubuntu, puppy Linux, and general Ubuntu as well) before settling once again with mint XFCE for about a year and a half now. I’ve thought about trying to go through the process of making a lightweight arch installation but for a simple “it just works” philosophy my current distro does just that in spades.
openSUSE Tumbleweed since 2019, it never breaks and if you break it you can easily roll back. Yes, there are a lot of updates, but I have a secondary system that I upgrade only once every six months and it works like a charm!
Same, Tumbleweed GNOME since 2019
Linuxmint here for 14yrs or so. Hopped around a lot but have been using LM as my primary OS and daily driver for personal, work AND gaming. (proton is a god send)
EDIT - to clarify I’ve been consistently on LM now for about 3yrs, not too bad.
My one desktop is 5 years on Manjaro now.
But I’ve had a freeBSD file server for at least 20.
UFS? Or did you migrate to zfs at some point?
head -n1 /var/log/pacman.log[2014-10-11 14:33] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -r /mnt -Sy --cachedir=/mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg --noconfirm base base-devel'Almost 9 years it seems
I used Linux Mint for about a decade on all my desktops and laptops. When I upgraded my gaming desktop to version 21, I started having some strange visual issues which I spent a lot of time troubleshooting unsuccessfully. I took that opportunity to try something new. I started with Nobara, a gaming-focused distro based on Fedora, and enjoyed the experience. I then started to embrace upstream distributions, so I replaced Nobara with Fedora and my remaining Linux Mint systems with Debian. Had I not encountered the strange issue with Linux Mint 21 on my gaming desktop, I’d probably still be using it exclusively today.
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 😛
I can’t imagine going back to that style of window management.
There are some pretty decent apps for Window management on Mac thankfully! I’m a big fan of Rectangle.
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 😉
3 years on EndeavourOS and no end in sight
I switched from Manjaro to EndeavourOS more or less a year ago and I’m not leaving any time soon.
What are the selling points on endeavour over Manjaro? Or endeavourOS over arch?
I’ve been on Manjaro a hot minute, and if I were to switch, I think I’d just go to arch. But I don’t personally know anything about EndeavourOS
EndeavourOS is more or less Arch with an installer. It uses the same repos has Arch, Manjaro has their own repos that they delay the packages update.
I really don’t have data to prove it, but EndeavourOS seems to run smoother than Manjaro.
But just use what works best for you.
Oh okay for sure, so if i can install arch than in your opinion should I just use arch instead of Endeavour?
Sure, why not. I choose Endeavour at the time because I couldn’t be bothered (lmostly lack of time) with the installation and configuration of Arch. Now Arch comes with an install script, that takes care of that for you.
