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?
I don’t do distro hopping, because I don’t believe there is any significant difference between the capabilities provided by individual distro. So, I switched only when changed jobs (2000-2006 Debian, 2006-2018 various RedHat/Fedora distros, 2018- various SUSE distros (Tumbleweed, now Greybeard).
Agreed. Hopping never really made sense to me unless you like to tinker. To me, the distro or operating system is just a means to an end. As long as all the hardware and apps I need continue to work as intended I won’t budge. I’ve been on Ubuntu LTS for 10+ years.
It could be actually the opposite. If you don’t want to tinker you may want to distro-hop to find out which one is proving the out-of-the-box experience that works the best for you. If you are going to tinker than in many ways the distro matters less because you can just do it all yourself if you want.
Of course there are other features like package availability and stability that will be strongly influenced by distro.
While I am not a distro-hopper I definitely don’t think that all distros are the same. There are significant and important differences that can be worth switching over.
Same. I’m a programmer, but not really a tinkerer anymore. I was on OS X for a long time because it was “a Unix machine with a nice GUI”, and it really did “just work”. Since switching to Linux in ~2016 or so, I ran Ubuntu on my work machine for a while until Windows Update borked itself and then the installer tricked me into formatting the wrong disk because the labels weren’t in the same order. >< I installed PopOS on a lark and couldn’t really tell the difference. More recently when upgrading a hard drive I tried Fedora on a lark and it too seems nearly identical. I guess I type “dnf” instead of “apt” now. >< Otherwise everything basically worked out of the box on all the distros and I haven’t really cared to look into the differences. (shrug)