What's the longest you've stayed on a distribution?

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's surprisingly stable for a rolling release distro.

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.

About two years, running Manjaro KDE. Runners up are Linux Mint, every major flavor of Ubuntu, and I briefly tried elementary OS. Manjaro has been my favorite for a while now!

3 years on EndeavourOS and no end in sight

When Mint had a KDE version I used that for almost four years. Then went to KDE neon and found that to be unstable. Hopped hither and thither, finally made it back to mint.

Having used Linux for 15 years, I just want stable now. Even user cinnamon mint was getting glitchy and updating too frequently. So I've been using the mint Debian edition for more than a few months and love it. IF I had to switch now, I'd just go to Debian.

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.

Workstation: Ubuntu approximately 18 years. (2004)

Servers: Debian approximately 25 years. (1998)

Been on Manjaro for about 4 years for my gaming PC but been running a Debian flavor for servers since Woody.

MX and Opensuse

openSUSE Tumbleweed KDE 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!

I was on Debian from around 1996ish to 2019.

Been on Pop OS since then.

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.

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 :/

I've been on Yggdrasil Linux since 1993. Now, get off my lawn, you punks!

Ahhh, when did Windows 10 come out? I've been on mint since then, though I've tried live discs/drives of the major distros here and there. I like mint, it works for me.

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 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.

Been disto-hopping a lot before ending up in openSUSE Tumbleweed (with KDE Plasma desktop). Now using it for about 6 years as my main desktop/laptop distro.

I used to switch frequently out of curiosity, but I've become less inclined to tinker with distros these days as so many of them are capable. I've been happy with Zorin for a couple of years and see no reason to switch!

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.

Been on Manjaro i3wm edition since 2018

I downloaded Ubuntu 5.04 and have mostly stuck with Ubuntu for almost 20 years. I've tried other distros over the years but I've always come back to Ubuntu.

I originally started with Knoppix in 1998 used that unitl i9 switched to ubuntu warty warthog and following versions until unity came out in then I switched to mint as unity constantly crashed my machine. stayed with mint for like 5 years, then moved to fedora for a year, switched to tumbleweed because I got tired of the SELinux in fedora causing issues.

Been on endeavourOS for a year now, and if i do decide to migrate a gain I will be going full vanilla arch.

I'm on Debian since 2012 and before that it was Ubuntu from 2008 to 2012

Ubuntu from 2006 right up until they replaced the firefox deb with a mandatory snap, whenever that was. Then I was on Pop OS for about 6 months, and now Fedora, which I don't see myself leaving anytime soon.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed and Arch. I can't stay for very long on non-rolling distros. I'd only run Tumbleweed but due to the lack of users or popularity, if often lacks documentation and everyone forgets it exists in the first place. I couldn't get Rocm working on Tumbleweed because of that for example.

I've only really used Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu (in that order!), each for years at a time over the past two decades. I suppose it shows how progessively fewer fucks I give about the inner workings of the system.

I also tried to install a copy of... TurboLinux 6, I think? that I got from a Ham Radio swap meet as a kid sometime in the '90s, but I never got it to work.

I've been using Ubuntu LTE for over 10 years now for servers. However, for personal machines I've been distro hopping every few years. Currently using Manjaro on both desktop and laptop now. My only gripe is recently it took them longer to release the latest gnome version than Ubuntu (it's usually the other way around being a rolling release distro).

Two decades.

The most I’ve ever made is 6 months. Redhat seems a lot less fragile so we’ll see.

Two years, Arch. Idk why but it feels comfy. Rolling release for the most up to date bugs + the AUR 👌🏼

I think probably Ubuntu, that was my first daily driver Linux, and I didn't really change it much because I was still learning how Linux worked and didn't want to mess with things too much. I was probably on that for close to 10 years. Then I eventually tried Manjaro which didn't last for too long and then I went full Arch BTW. So Arch will probably end up being the longest running one eventually because I really have no desire to change over to anything else now.

My one desktop is 5 years on Manjaro now.

Before that I had Ubuntu for 8 years across several installs, although I also dual-booted Windows back then.

But I've had a freeBSD file server for at least 20.

I've been using openSUSE since it's early days when it was S.u.S.E. I started using it in the spring of 1998... so what, 25 years? I've used other distros on a second machine, but my main machine has always been SuSE in some form or another. Today it's openSUSE Tumbleweed.

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.

Honestly, about 4 months, and it was Arch. I've been using Linux for over a year now. Currently I'm on NixOS trying to make things work the way I want them to, but there's still some minor issues that are difficult to deal with.

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've been using OpenBSD on my desktop since about 2006ish.

I've stayed on Endeavour with XFCE for a good while now. It just works and is out of my hair. I use it on any system I want Linux on now and I've stopped hopping.

I've been staying with Arch for a while now, maybe a few months. Might switch to NixOS in the future but right now I'm happy. I used Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, etc before that.

For servers I’ve been using Ubuntu Server since ~2016. For my desktop I used Ubuntu up to 2019 when I switched to Arch.

It either has to be my current arch install or my Debian install before that. I might head back to Debian (sid) since it was close enough. I might swap over to Debian stable on my laptop over the current Ubuntu install though.

My main desktop computer had been running Ubuntu for 7 years until I had to do a full wipe and decided to move to arch to check it out. I never got the point of distro hopping myself really.

I have been 11 years on Fedora.

Before 2009 I was getting used to Linux with Ubuntu. By 2009 I switched to Fedora. Since 2020 I'm on Manjaro. Inbetween I payed many other distros a visit such as Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian and Puppy.

On servers I am for no specific reason on Debian and Ubuntu.

Used a bunch of distros since somewhere around 2001, but I've kept at least one Gentoo - or Gentoo derivate - machine since 2008. Nowadays my personal machines are all pure Gentoo, with a mix of Debian and *EL for servers.

Fedora 30 to 38. Whatever that amounts. Staying on Arch indefinitely.

@unix_joe fedora and arch. Because anything Ubuntu based kinda sucks.

Ubuntu from 2010ish - 2015. Fedora ever since, with a short period of playing around with Arch on my laptop in early 2020.

Lets see. Debian since 1997... so 26 years. Back then you had to order 12 CDs through the post.

My dad used to hope distros constantly. He would read distrowatch and want to try the latest and greatest out.

I've been with Ubuntu server since 1404. Not always the smoothest road but it's worked for me. Snap is ridiculous though.

My longest was when i went 100% Full time on my main machine (no dual boot), I stopped distro-hoppping. I Installed Debian stable when it first came out (Jessie) and stayed with it until it shifted to "old-stable" which was a little bit over 3 years.

A lot of people give Debian stable a hard time but i found it worked well. Most software that i needed to be a little bit newer i could get from the backports repository. It was only at the end of it's lifecycle that i noticed started running in to software being a little to old for what i wanted to do. Then i went back to distro-hopping for a while until i found my next home. :-)

Probably Debian for six or seven years, but my time on Manjaro must be close by now and I see no reason to change

Going on year 3 of Manjaro. Looking forward to many more.

5 or 6 years using ArchLinux, I'm very happy :)

First one was SuSe, but I've been with Ubuntu since the early days... Sometimes I'll install another distro to have a peek, but I always revert to Ubuntu after a short while...Only time I felt the urge to change, was when they shipped it with unity as default...

Started on Mint properly in about 2019, but hopped around a little via Manjaro, Garuda, Endeavour and finally came back to Mint full time. These days if I want to try another distro I just install on a separate disk and leave my Mint as my every day install. So full time on Mint since about 2021.

I have been trying Fedora as my secondary too.

I dabbled with Linux/Unix (Suse, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, Arch, NetBSD, a little Solaris, a couple of those long-dead floppy/livecd/liveusb systems... and some less-unix things like BeOS) starting in about 1998 and slowly moved fully over to Linux as the daily driver. My usual distro for personal machines has been Arch since about 2004, though I've typically had *buntu, and/or CentOS (starting at cAos, now migrating to Rocky) machines for some things I do professionally, and at least one personal Debian server.

I did a lot of environment hopping early on, but settled on XFCE from about 2007-2017, then KDE from about 2017-current once Plasma5 got its resource consumption under control. I've been playing with Hyprland a little bit recently, just because it's the least-broken way to fiddle with a Wayland environment I've found, but I like floating+snapping better than tiling so I doubt it'll become my daily driver.

I think my first Arch install was off 0.2 or 0.3 media in mid-2002, and there are probably only a month or two in that time that I haven't had at least one Arch box, so that's two decades.

Probably Debian from 2014 to 2019, when I switched to GNU Guix System. I don't really intend to switch any time soon though so I'll stick with Guix for the foreseeable future.

I only just started using linux on my laptop like a year and a half ago, I hoped around at first but then around a year ago landes on Fedora with KDE, and haven't used anything else (besides SteamOS) sense

Fedora for the last 4 or 5 years

I distro hopped quite a bit before I settled. Now been running Arch coming up a decade. Before my current PC build, my previous continuous install was 6 years old.

I've DE hopped a number of times throughout that time though. Now been using KDE for several years and happy to stay.

I was on Arch for a couple of years on and off (had only 256 GB of storage on my old laptop, so I didn't dual boot), stopped using Linux for around a year, and now I've been on Fedora for a year and a half.

Though I thinking of going back to Ubuntu on their next LTS release, part of the reason I wanted cutting-edge distros was because I wanted updated packages, especially Gnome as every update brought big (positive) changes. Most of it seems to have stabilized with only small creature comforts being added now, so I want a stable distro that doesn't cause Windows to ask me to enter my encryption key every couple of weeks due to a kernel update.

2008->2012 : Ubuntu, loved it until Unity and the bloatware started

2013->2014 : Arch, as a learning experience, left because kde stuff broke all the time and i really liked the new plasma5

2014->2019 : Opensuse Tumbleweed, loved how they handled packages, the default configs, and how well KDE ran on them, i switched to it mainly because it was at the time the best distro for plasma5, hated btrfs because it kept taking a lot of disk space for it's snapshots.

2019->2023(today) : PopOS, loved how they implemented tiling, and being on a debian based distro is very convenient, don't realy like the outdated repos, and started to like gnome more.

On servers i never left Ubuntu, and have only a couple of projects on CentOS.

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.

Ubuntu since 2008. I like the large selection of software in their Apt repositories. And I have never felt a need to use anything else, as it gets the job of an operating system done just fine.

I started with Gentoo in 2007 on old Apple hardware (my laptop which was getting old, but I didn't want to replace it). I soon realized that it was kind of a waste of time trying to get all those little details, like device drivers for obscure Apple peripheral. All I really need is an OS that just works, so I can get my work done. I bought a netbook that officially supported Linux (Dell Inspiron Mini 10) and used it for a good 5 years as a daily driver, then eventually upgraded to a more powerful machine, but kept using Ubuntu, and have been ever since.

I've been on Debian for about 10 years now. I know there's plenty of other great distros, but now I want one that's stable and just works.

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.

I used the same Ubuntu install since at least 18.04, possibly back to 16.04 (can't quite remember if I upgraded to 18.04 as a fresh install), up until my upgrade to 22.04 from 20.04 failed. I took that opportunity to try a different distro, which eventually led to my current KDE Neon install.

On servers I've stuck with Ubuntu LTS's since 2017. They've always been rock solid, even if the 2-4 year upgrade can be time consuming, it's not often enough for me to try something else. The support and documentation is excellent. I find it hard to think of a single reason to even try something else.

On the desktop I probably have spent most time on Ubuntu, or Ubuntu derivative like Kubuntu, but I now use EndeavourOS and I have no plans to switch or hop or try anything else. So I'll likely end up on Endeavour far longer.

@unix_joe: I've been using SUSE with KDE since SuSE Linux Personal 7.0. So, 20+ years?

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

Started with Ubuntu for just a year on desktop and Debian on server for nearly 10 years. Desktop switched in this time from arch to Debian, back to arch, and finally to Fedora. This will never change. Debian - server, Fedora - desktop.

I tested some others in VM: elementary, SuSe, Archcraft, kubuntu, lubuntu, xubuntu, PopOS, manjaro. None of these passed my expectations for a bare metal install.

On phone: mobian, manjaro, postmarket and the winner danctnix-arch. But I want to give postmarket a second chance.

I used Manjaro for 3 years 2018-2021 on my laptop. I think that's the longest yet. Been using EndeavourOS since, almost 2 years now.

My main PC has been running Arch without interruptions for about 12 years. I've run Debian on my server for around 15 years now.

It just works. Why change?

I've been using Linux Mint (Cinnamon) as my only operating system since 2016. No dual booting.

I've been on ubuntu for quite some time now. Experimented with it from 12.04 onward and then fully embraced it since 14.04. I always use the LTS version and it has been rock solid the entire time. I've run kububtu or lubuntu on low end laptops and secondary machines, but nothing comes quite close to normal ubuntu's stability and ergonomics. It's very polished.

I do miss some unity features, like the top bar of windows merging with the top panel (the one with the clocks). Having that extra screenspace was always very useful on modern 16:9 screens. If you open Firefox and look at the size of the web view compared to the screen size, you'll know what I mean.

The recent move to snaps is actually a welcome one security wise. I much prefer closed source software to be bundled as snaps. The startup time for snap programs is drastically better with the newer versions too, so I don't mind it at all on my systems, modern or low end.

The only pet peeve with snaps is that Firefox can't open local files right now. It stops me from using local documentation generated by Rust's cargo and rustup tools.

I initially started out with Puppy Linux on a stick, experimented with fedora at some point and even considered trying arch. But at the end of the day there is only so much time and effort I am willing to spend on my productive system. Ubuntu LTS has just been the perfect fit throughout.

Archlinux since 2009
So 14 years

Been on Artix Linux for about 3 years. Occasionally there’s a package that breaks, but nothing serious. Been very happy with a minimal environment using Bspwm/sxhkd and the st terminal mainly.