How long do you stick with a particular distro?
 

Hello LQ members

What's the longest time you stayed with a particular distro without distro hopping?

I've been using pclinuxos for two years now and still do so. I do occasionally distro hop, but it's through a VM. However, PClinuxOS is always the main host OS and the only distro on my PC.

Thanks for reading

Hi,

about 15 years.

Evo2.

Everything was just peachy until Mandrake got into trouble. Since then it's all been a bit of a hopping frenzy. I stuck with slackware for about 6 months once. Then I borked it and couldn't get it back to where it was before. Some days I can install several distros, one after another (there are reasons, it's not all mental illness).
That said, the closest I've come to thinking "hmmm, I could stay here", has been with Voyager Linux and elementaryOS.

About 10 years with Slackware (and many more to come!), 6 with Mandrake before that, mostly SuSe before that but with a good bit of evaluation of others in the early days.

I just never was a distro hopper and can't relate... ;)

with the exception of a couple of using ubuntu, my machines at home have been redhat/fedora for the past 15 years.

First started Linux on my old laptop. I was trying to find out a simple lightweight linux distro, hence I used to switch a lot between small size distros.

Then I switched to Debian Netinstall soon. It gave me a good lightweight start. I added lot of stuff on it. I used Debian for around 3 years before getting a new laptop.

Now I run Arch Linux and Gentoo.

Nowadays I do not switch linux distros but I am always on way to find a better distro for me as compared to I am using.

Well in general I use a distro until it's version's End Of Life. So after using Debian Squeeze for about 3 years (still I use on old laptop), I switched to Arch.

I just never was a distro hopper and can't relate...

Too much choice overwhelms.

I guess ubuntu is the one I have used consistently the last couple years. One of my desktops and my old media centre both use ubuntu. My RPi uses Arch and I play around with LFS on my laptop. So for an actual time frame, I'd say about 2 years. I hop around too much. I never seem to find myself happy somewhere :)

More 10 years with Slackware.

i was distro hopper in the past (slackware, slack, dsl, mandrake, debian, knoppix, vector linux, some (lxk)ubuntu's, backtrack, openbsd). nowadays im using debian(virtualbox)/debian based(kali) distros. in the future i am installing slackware to my box, which i really, really like, maybe going to install openbsd also.

but to answer ur question, i have been using debian since 2006ish, also used openbsd maybe 2004-2008 as a desktop and transparent bridge firewall to guard home network.

1) Six months with Ubuntu.

2) Three months with Fedora.

3) Been on Arch for almost a year now, albeit I took the Archbang route initially because I wanted instant gratification at the time when I was migrating from Fedora, but I replaced the Archbang default Openbox config with my own MATE config, however I do wanna attempt a vanilla Arch install on my computer at some point down the road.

4) Haven't tried Gentoo yet, but I wanna try it at some point down the road either in a VM or on a second machine as well. Arch will remain the primary distro on my main computer though.

I run several distros here. Of those, the ones I've been using the longest are Ubuntu (about 8 years) and Debian (almost 7 years).

Member Response
 

Hi,

When PV released Slackware I decided to jump on for the ride and never jumped off. I am very comfortable with Slackware & the community so why would one explore other avenues? I do use other Diagnostic/Recovery/Maintenance based Gnu/Linux to enhance my abilities when using my systems or benches. But I do not consider this as distro-hopping.

Love my Slack!
Have fun & enjoy.
:hattip:

Cool replies from all. Thanks

:)

"Distros" are simply different ways of packaging (and servicing ...) more-or-less the same thing. It really doesn't matter too much which one you choose, as long as the packages are kept current by whomever is responsible for doing that. It matters most that you keep the packages up-to-date, especially the security-related ones.

Incidentally, this was an underpinning of Red Hat's business model since the very beginning, which makes it by far the most profitable "IPO stock" I ever bought. They charge money for servicing, and they provide a service-level agreement (SLA) regarding it. This enables them to take on big-business requirements and to be profitable doing so.

I play with other distros occasionally, but stick with Slackware, since version 12.

i second that

i can understand 'distro shopping', eg: trying a few distros before deciding on one, then sticking with that one, and only 'hopping' when your distro of choice for whatever reason no longer does what you need/want it to do.


my short jog to Ubuntu was more out of necessity than choice (work related), but the moment i was able to put Fedora back on the machine, I did

my only other hop was between redhat (the oler NON enterprise versions) and Fedora, which isn't exactly a big 'hop'

I usually get bored with a "distro" when all the thinking is done for me.

I have used Slackware for 720 days.

Tried a few distros when I "discovered" Linux in 2004. Slackware 10.0 was the first I installed in late '04/ early '05. I never thought any of the other distros were bad, just that they didn't suit me. And I've lost interest in trying any others, now. Sticking with Slack for as long as it or I last.

6 months is the longest period of time that I've ever stayed off Slackware.

If I want to give a distribution a fair chance, though, I usually try to use it exclusively for 2 months.

I used slackware for a week once. But with systemd insinuating itself into all the distros these days, i might give it another go.

I've been using Debian (alongside other distros) continuously for about 7 or 8 years, so I guess that's the longest I've used a particular distro.

Over the years, I've tried just about all the popular distros many times but I've stuck with Arch as my default distro for more than 10 years now. That doesn't keep me from trying other distros from time to time just to see how they compare. I see no reason to leave Arch as long as it's keeping me happy.

My desktop computers have always run Red Hat, Fedora, or CentOS. I tried Debian Stable once, when I was getting exasperated by the increasingly experimental nature of Fedora, but fled back after 3 weeks. My little Thinkpad got Salix because it's too slow for CentOS.

On the other hand, as you may have noticed, I post reviews on this site, so my total number of distros used (or attempted, in some dire cases) currently stands at 113.

Are these business Desktops or personal? Have you run into any situation where you had to move to Windows/dual boot for compatibility?

Greetz
I continually play with many distros to see if they're doing anything cool (usually not) amd to be able to speak intelligently about them from experience rather than from ignorant bias. I play on those but it is usually more than just a cursory couple of days. I try to login a few hundred hours if the install isn't totally whack.

I play around on those and they change after a few months but I work (and play games and videos) in Slackware and have since 1999. I can see no reason for that to change anytime soon.

Though I've used a number of different distros (I had two Dells that came with Ubuntu back in the good old days when you could get Dells with Ubuntu easily), I've always had Slackware on at least one computer since my first Linux experience, which was with Slackware in April 2005.

My next longest continuous Linux distro is with Debian which has been on this here computer since Lenny and for about six months on one of my laptops a couple of years before that (that laptop died after five years of good and faithful service).

Wherever I wander, I always come back to Slack.

These are home computers, but basically for office-style use. As for Windows, my only experience of that was when I did some work for a society on their computer about 20 years ago. I've been given .doc files and had no trouble with them, and when I've done any journalism they've wanted plain text.

About 6 months appears to be the limit for me. When I find a distro I like something usually happens that makes me switch. I ran Solus then it died, ran Watt 7.5 and the developer switched bases, now running MX-14 and Mint...

I've been using Linux full time since 2007.
As to the question, I guess in a sense you could say I've been using the same distro continuously. I multi-boot so I always have 5-8 distros on my hard drives at any given time. I started with PcLinux back in the old Kde3 days and used it pretty much exclusively, then had a few issues around 2010 and went to Slackware as my primary OS. I still use PcLinux as my anchor system as it seems the only distro still using Grub legacy which I prefer and because it was the distro that introduced me to Linux.
I will say if there was no Slackware i would still probably use PcLinux as my everyday system as it does have a lot going for it, but Slackware is and probably will remain my main OS for the foreseeable future. Unless of course they go to systemd, then I guess I'll be forced to learn Bsd.

Centos

Slackware - 9 years so far. There are other distros?

When I get pissed off I move on. Sometimes takes a while - sometimes not. Sometimes I come back - sometimes not.

I'm more interested in the kernel itself (i.e. *Linux"*) than the wrappings. However all developers (including the kernel devs) make some stupid decisions. Then it's "refer to first sentence".

I've had a Slackware install since around the time I joined. I keep a dedicated partition for other distros I want to try out for trivial reasons: newer DE and other things I don't really care to have on my Slack installs enough to bother with.

I did the usual move from one distro to the other at first and settled on Kubuntu for my desktop until Canonical did something annoying and I decided to give Debian a shot. A few years ago I moved my EEEPC from Mint to Debian also and my Pi runs Raspbian. So as things stand I've been using Debian on my desktop for at least 5 years and my EEE for I'd say at least 3.
However, I do keep playing with Slackware and have dual-booted now and again. So if I find there's a change to Debian I don't like that's likely where I'll jump ship to.
I also like to play with a few distro's in VirtualBox to get an idea of what's out there, pick up ideas and the like.

I stuck with Mandrake for about 4 years; since then for my desktops and dev stations I've always seemed to use Ubuntu. At home I tried MINT and kept that and then found out it's Ubuntu based.

On target boards for systems we send out: we always give the manufacturer's default distribution a try, but have also used MonteVista, Debian, or just kernel.org and built it ourselves. We very rarely use anything like a "full" distribution for a product.

Exactly as long as a distro fits my needs. This is the reason why I use different distros for different purposes. On my desktop and laptop it now is Gentoo, but I still have Slackware, Salix and one Debian machine (actually a VPS) around.

I've been using Debian as my main OS more than 8 years now. Once in a while, either on spare hardware or a VM, I'll try something else.