Looking for longest running desktop oriented installation
 

I've been awake for way too long, just throwing that out there.

Happened to notice on conky that my uptime is now 61 days (yay no power outages!) It got me thinking, anybody seen in their internet travels (or experienced for that matter) what the longest running non-server, *nix installation is? Just curious- the server in our research lab has about a year and a half uptime last time I looked (but thats the life of a server). My brain isn't firing on all cylinders right now (or maybe my processor isn't working with all cores enabled).

Also, what is the longest anyone has had a *nix distro installed? With some serious tinkering, you can upgrade without having to reformat/start from scratch. I mean for instance, has anyone upgraded from Slackware v1.0 to v14.1 cumulatively over the past two-and-a-bit decades?

It's been tried, somewhere between v4 and v8 they end up trying to write the Slackware Wiki in their own feces on the walls of their padded room. Analysis of the sigils renders no usable data so the FDA discontinued that clinical trial several years ago.

You can't leave a system running that long without patching anymore, six months, a year tops, after that you're script kiddie bait.

This page is interesting:

http://uptimes-project.org/

Hi JW
Longest running server from your link
Looks like somebody just forgot to unplug it....

With rolling distributions such as Arch it should be possible to keep them installed indefinitely as it is not necessary to upgrade to new versions.

Arch does fall down a bit on the uptimes though as a reboot is needed every time the kernel is upgraded which is about every 3 days...

Maybe it's so old that they forgot where the plug is. Although I was looking for desktop distributions, a 10-11 year uptime for a server is incredible.

Well, after looking at the clock and realizing that my bodily uptime is now 3 days 12 hours, maybe I should call the project (that on tuesday I forgot was due tomorrow) finished, have a beer and call it quits. Wait....

I once came across a PC-DOS store controller (it ran the IBM registers) that had been up 6 years and change.
I sweated bullets when I rebooted that thing.

I'd cron that job, cuts down on user error.

Uptime of this machine: 42 years 346 days

I know, unbelievable :hattip:

See also.

42 years for an Intel Xeon, right.

My current desktop has been up for 60 days. But... it goes to sleep after 2 hours of inactivity. And that happens multiple times a day. So this tells more about the quality of the suspend procedure than about the running stability. I am most surprised about the suspending.

jlinkels

I guess our main problems are power losses, we do not have battery backups except whatever would be there as part of a laptop.

But mostly our work systems are up all the time, especially *Nix ones. 6 mos to 1+ years. Not as impressive as the 42 year one unfortunately ...

What're you specifically looking for here? Brag-Stories? Statements that distro X or Y happens to be better at not requiring reboots?

And as far as "non-server", well we produce embedded Linux for various products. Who's to say that a refrigerator hasn't been running for years, again with the exception of power losses? Or like a home network appliance? And one of my former jobs involved Telco gateway devices which had to be 99.999% availability, also running Linux. Some of the issues there were also things like card redundancy and rolling upgrades, therein meaning that card were rebooted, but not powered down so that they received upgrades when needed.

I guess it's all a matter of perspective as to what you're doing and also what the premise of the question really is.

I think think OP prefaced the discussion with he was exhausted and perhaps not thinking clearly and from there it just degenerated into water cooler chatter.
However I, for one, would like to see the 42 year old Xeon processor.(I'm joining Jinkels on that one in calling BS).

Wow, sleep is good. I forgot how good it feels.

Actually I was really just looking to see how long a system that gets used for day to day stuff will stay stable. Servers and embedded systems (which I forgot about) are designed by default to stay running 24/7 for years at a time, barring power outages if no UPS is used. Having myself been awake for 84 and a bit hours and seeing my system's 60 day uptime got me thinking, I don't usually turn off my mac mini (mid '07) because the EFI takes forever to boot Ubuntu and on standby (not hibernate) the mac only consumes 10 or so watts of power according to my kill-a-watt meter so I don't worry about the power drain.

This is the computer that I do work on when I am in my living room, it is also a media center so it sees some heavy usage with a relatively heavy OS. Because it's a media center, all the fancy shiny stuff is enabled and I expect some random gnome-shell video glitchiness or a few zombie processes that can be cured by rebooting. Even with a good cleaning regimen a system will build up temp/cache files and the ram/swap can become cluttered to some extent, much like my brain was last night (or day, I lost track) and a reboot will solve at least some of the slowness caused by prolonged usage.

Fake

The E5520 was launched in 2009.

I had a laptop with an uptime of nearly two years. Stopped when the HDD overheated (according to SMART), and stopped responding.

Wow.

Which distribution were you running?