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.

this run on xubuntu i think. when i first switched to mint (xfce) a few years back i'd reinstall every month or so because i broke something, yes with enough misguided tinkering linux mint can be broken. then i'd spend a week-month on other distros, mx linux, peppermint, all the ubuntus, then manjaro that got me on to minimal installs, then arch btw, then endeavour, with my own awesome or openbox config. i thought i'd settled down for 6 months or so, but the threat of a bad package was always there (even though it never happened). when i got my latest laptop i installed mint again, with my openbox config. after a while i started noticing things weren't running quite right, so i just thought "instead of changing everything, just change what i need to" and went with xub for slightly more up to date repos. turns out i can get pretty much all the functionality i had with openbox out of xfce. so i've managed to stay on one install for about 18 months!

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

I was on Arch for 4years. Been on Fedora for 3 now. Same install.

i think that was only a year and it was ubuntu

I've been on Solus for my office computer for just over 5 years. Works great! I was worried that was going to change when they had a leadership crisis a few months back but that resolved well and Solus is stronger then ever.

The attraction to Solus is that it is rolling and stable. That combination is not common elsewhere.

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.

I used Ubuntu from 8.10 until the introduction of snaps (2017, 2018?). And since then I’ve just stuck with Debian. :)

Linux Mint since 2018. Everything has worked so smoothly, I've never felt the need to change.

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.

I started with SLS around 1993, tracking it into Slackware. From 1996 thereabouts on, I used RedHat mostly and Suse occasionally.

Both of those going more commercial each in their own ways didn't sit too well with me.

In 2004 I found gentoo, and am sticking with it for most everything since.

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.

I've been on Mint for about a decade now

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.

I tend to stick with one distro for a while but use it across multiple uses (my home PC as a separate boot partition to Windows, and within Virtualbox as a guest in windows and also in linux itself). I find it easier to stick to one Distro and get used to the distro's paradigm.

At the moment I'm using Mint and have done for a few years. I used Lubuntu before that. I'll be sticking with Mint until I next decide to refresh my PC and will revisit what's available at that time; maybe stick with Mint or move to something else if something is appealing.

I've never really used non-Linux distros apart from testing for fun.

Debian stable for the most part since the 90s. Lots of floppies involved...

I was almost seduced to the dark side when FreeBSD allowed booting from a single floppy then netinstalling the rest. 1996? 1997? Very sexy. I did a test install but reverted to linux for business and personal.

Y'all USB-installing youngins should be glad you never had to listen to a floppy drive grinding along for hours. Falling asleep on the floor and seeing INSERT DISK 8 of 15 when you woke up.

I switched 2010 from Windows to Linux.

• Ubuntu (2010)
• Linux Mint (2012)
• Arch Linux (2020)

Mandrake/Mandriva 2002 - 2006

Xubuntu 2006 - 2007

Debian 2007 - 2015

Ubuntu 2016 - present

So I was with Debian the longest so far.

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.

Depends on the system. I've run my Pis with PiOS exclusively since I started with Linux at the beginning of 2020. I ran a media box on PopOS for a year and a half before switching it to Mint XFCE after having some issues. It is also just a media box so it would really be fine on headless Debian or Ubuntu Server.

I finally got around to switching my primary machine to Linux (Mint specifically) just three months ago. I'm comfortable with Debian/Ubuntu based distros at this point and don't feel the need to play with something else. I might end up with a different desktop though as Cinnamon gets a bit wonky on my machine from time to time.

@unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org i am a chronic user of Ubuntu and Debian. I tend to stick with the distro for decades.

I've just picked Fedora 33 and never had any urge to distro-hopp. Now Im on F38 and Im still happy. Maybe in some day I will transition to Silverblue

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.

Still using Slackware on various iterations of hardware since '06.

Probably Linux Mint or Solus, the problem with Mint was the older package base. I loved all of the built-in tools they had, but everything else was so far behind and Cinnamon doesn't even support Wayland. Solus was the next one I tried, but it has slowly been dying, with their lead dev resigning and the guy maintaining Budgie taking over again, I'm not sure how trustworthy they really are at this point. I'm also aware of the whole serpentOS deal they have with Ikey right now, but honestly that doesn't really bring me any comfort. I switched to endeavor and I can't see myself moving away from it any time soon. I did have a brief run with Nobara, but the fact that it was based on Fedora and Fedora usually takes some hoops to jump through for extra package repos and there are some packages that require compiling from source, so I didn't really want to mess with it anymore.

Debian. Since hmm... 1.3 I think?
A bit hazy on that one, but I think it's correct.

Of course I've tried plenty of other dists over the year (most of them I guess), but my "daily driver" (work computer/laptop) has always been Debian.

Servers.. it's been mostly RedHat, Centos, some Ubuntu. Don't think I've ever installed Debian "in production".

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

I'd say archlinux. Been a arch user since 2016 I believe, and honestly really like the distro :)

I don't really hop distros, but there are caveats to that statement;

• I started with Debian proper (for about 4 years, mostly high school), but now I generally use Ubuntu for personal desktops and laptops (nothing I want to do fails to work, so I haven't felt the need to specialize). Been doing that for... what... 15? 20 years?
• I used to run mostly RH-like distros in my lab (probably because my job at the time used mainly RH-likes), but now it's Ubuntu (just because I'm not really doing anything more complicated than LAMP, and once again I can't be bothered to specialize).
• My SteamDeck runs Arch, and it's great. I don't really dig into the innards, so it doesn't feel much different than RH/Debian. It uses KDE, and I usually run XFCE, but the experience is basically the same.
• I flip between RH/Debian distros for work (each job usually standardizes on one).

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.

I've started using Manjaro about seven years. Before that I was using Ubuntu, but I always went back to Windows after two or three years. Does that count as distrohopping? Since Manjaro I am on Linux exclusively.

Probably an unpopular one but I’ve been on Elementary OS for my main laptop for 5 years and Debian for servers for 8

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

Debian (testing) at least since 2018 and I don't plan to switch. Before that I was hopping a bit between ubuntu based distros and manjaro. On servers I always use debian stable.

I have only gone full-linux for two years now. Before that I was on Mac for 10 years and before that Windows. I have had various machines that ran either Ubuntu or Debian that were not my main machine, but mostly backup or file servers.

I am generally happy with Ubuntu, although sometimes I feel like a more bleeding edge distro could be nice when I am looking for more up to date packages with the latest features. It is somewhat annoying having to go beyond the main package manager to install these newer packages, because installation instructions are not always available. E.g., a make file is available but there are no instructions on dependencies. At this point I am not/no longer looking to switch distels.

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.

Used Fedora for like 3 years on my laptop, haven't really found any other distro that interests me

I'm not much of a distro-hopper. I think I've been on just four distros on my daily-driving desktop & laptop since about 1999:

• RedHat (around 1999, starting with 6.0)
• Mandrake (around 2001?)
• Ubuntu (around 2006)
• Arch Linux (around 2012 - today), and no intention to hop. In fact, I recently bought a new PC and installed Arch again. On the previous machine, I installed it once and it rolled nicely its entire lifetime.

My personal server has been running Ubuntu LTS for ages, I might have run debian a long time ago, but I'm not sure anymore. Nowadays I run a container setup, and those are running on Alpine Linux.

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.

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