business_kid

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When I was designing hardware in 2002, I had a pcb designed for me by a guy who had the same slackware box for 8 years at that point. Libs were becoming a problem, and he was looking to update some packages but he had cad, and eagle software on it and it was a work box for him. That's the longest I heard of. I never managed that myself - too many kids around.

m_shroom

Distro and hardware upgrades keep me in the 1 to 2 year range

hans51

I have never been forced to a Linux reinstall, but I enjoy the new feature richer versions on my laptops and thus I reinstall Linux in the newest available versions. While my opensuse linux offers upgrade without reinstall, I prefer a clean install of a newer version over an upgrade on existing system.

Linux is progressing so fast that a 1-2 year full reinstall with always newest features and SW / OS version is well worth the efforts.

smeezekitty

return FALSE;

King_DuckZ

I can't really answer as I'm new to Linux (I got it on my new laptop since when I bought it 6 months ago). Since then I reinstalled 4 or 5 distros in order to find the one I like, and now I got Mandriva and Fedora running flawlessly in spite of my nose sticking in system files all the time.
Only once the bugged Mandriva packet manager removed KDE and other important stuff as it tought it was "orphaned", but I was still able to boot from shell and fix it - I'm on that same install right now.

Speaking of Win, I've been a Win 2000 user for a long time, but I used to reinstall roughly once every year, mostly to get a clean registry, less junk scattered in the system, and to get rid of pieces left around from uninstallers.
I believe Win 2000 to be a nice system, but considering you have to run PC Cillin, Explorer and 1000 other malwares, you can understand why I needed to cleanup.

I'll take the chance for a question: I heard that Mandriva 2010 wil come out REALLY soon, will I have to reinstall my system in order to update to it? This is my first update to a higher version!

archtoad6

I ran SmoothWall Express on an old PII box w/ about 128MB of RAM until the magic smoke escaped from the pwr. supply. (I actually saw the magic smoke escape. )

Zetec

Without taking this too off topic.

In my limited linux knowledge isn't having a server up for so long a security risk as your not using a newer kernel?

I pre-empt you answer could depend on what the server is doing but would appreciate your POV anyway.

nigelc

well I have quite an old version of Fedora still waiting for to it crash or become nonfunctional.
Am able to get to archives to install software If I chose.

this is what uname shows:
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.20-1.2320.fc5 #1 Tue Jun 12 18:50:38 EDT 2007 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

When I worked at Compac just before it was taken over by HP there were the so-called experts that said they installed windows every year. Whilst installing xp it has to reboot several times, then there is the updates + all the software. All this takes over an hour. Then there are anti virus updates etc.

archtoad6

In the W2k days, the only half joking advice was to re-install "Winders" every 6 months whether it needs it or not.

sundialsvcs

I haven't "reinstalled" Linux on any of my boxes since the day that I put Linux into service on any of them. Nor do I plan to. Obviously I do keep the various systems reasonably up-to-date, although since all of them are "inward facing" I don't even do that as much as I probably ought to.

Even the Windows (XP-SP2) boxes have not been updated in several years now. When you don't run as Administrator on the boxes, and don't run any of the so-called "anti-virus" (sic...) software on any of them, and you do have a full and current (Microsoft Backup) backup of everything that's on them, well, I just let 'em do their jobs... as they have done, literally, for many years.

raskin

Rolling-release distribution with rollbacks allows me to keep installation continuity indefenitely - until I kill the notebook hardware... And it is currently x86, so the next one will be installed with different architecture (I hope that ARM will be enough for me, but if it will be x86, it will have >4G memory and use amd64 mode).

dragonslayer48dx

Every 3 years, when a new LTS version is released for Ubuntu. My personal preference is a clean install. Kinda 'set in my ways' from the early days of DOS.

Cheers

Caesar Tjalbo

OS installed November 21, 2007 at 02:31. Last dist-upgrade 2 days ago. Rolling release FTW.

xcristi

1. aprox one year and a half
2. a fresh reinstall for a new version of Slackware (the old distro was ok, just trying to see something new )

Bobber47

There certainly is a benefit to re-installation for Windows maintenance (disk/registry related performance declines), but I have never re-installed Linux for maintenance: I have only done new installations of recent distro versions. Because I adopted Ubuntu as my standard OS on most of my systems, I initially matched the 6-month cycle of upgrades available, but have reverted to the 1.5-3 year cycle of patch support to reduce labor (though it is fairly easy). I'm currently running 8.04 LTS and 8.10, but I'm tempted to upgrade to take advantage of the advances since then. So installation has always been voluntary.