Linux

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PopOS, loved how they implemented tiling, and being on a debian based distro is very convenient, don't realy like the outdated repos, and started to like gnome more.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

Ubuntu from 5.04 to 18.04. The memory usage and Gnome redesign got too annoying. I switched to Arch and KDE.

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.

Linux Mint for AMD, Pop_OS! for Nvidia. Former is workstation, latter is gaming.

Almost there with OpenSUSE, 9 years and counting. A new machine is running Manjaro for 2 years. I don't think I'd spend a decade with Manjaro.

Manjaro ended my distro hopping itch +10 years ago. I occasionally test distros in VM, but nothing has made me want to switch so far.

I started out on SuSE back in 94 and spent a while checking out rpm-based distros like Mandrake, RedHat, etc. Even stuff like m68k Linux, Slackware and the BSDs. Debian at that time was a pain to use. Used Gentoo for a while until I switched to Mac. After that I used Ubuntu, Mint, Antergos, Manjaro, Arch and Fedora.

And then I started noticing a pattern that I would always get frustrated with whatever I was trying out and go back to Fedora. So now it's been around five years I've stuck with Fedora for my gaming machine and my desktop.

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

I have used Mandrake / Mandriva for over 10 years. Since 2010 I use Arch. So also already for more than 10 years.

Personally, I have never understood why some people regularly change the distribution. When I am interested in a distribution, I simply install it in a virtual environment for testing.

I've been hopping between Gentoo and Arch for at least a decade and you can't stop me from doing it again >:P

(Currently using Arch on two systems, bytheway :'D Already thinking of hopping back to Gentoo on the desky one. Maybe try Funtoo. Unless there's a Funthree :thinkyface: ;P )

My current one, Fedora, since 36 had just released. I'll probably continue to use it as I wasn't as much of a distro hopper as most people anyway.

I've been running crux on my main workstation since 2014 now, and never looked back. Though nowadays, OpenBSD feels pretty appealing to me (I run it exclusively on my ~6 VPS).

As my personal day-tp-day system, It looks like 8 years of Ubuntu. I have a file server that just will not die that's been running Ubuntu LTS since 2008 though.

Here's my Distro journey:

1996-1997 - Debian (Still dual booting Windows)
1997-2002 - RedHat Desktop 5.0-7.3 (Linux became my main day-to-day OS!)
2002-2003 - Crux
2003-2008 - Gentoo
2008-2012 - Ubuntu / Ubuntu LTS
2012-2014 - Mint
2014-2022 - Ubuntu / Ubuntu LTS / Xubuntu (I switched back to Ubuntu as my personal OS since I had deployed Ubuntu to over 100 systems at work, and I had a little netbook with Xubuntu) 
2022-???? - LMDE 5 (Linux Mint - Debian Edition)

Still loving LMDE.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

Archlinux since 2009
So 14 years

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. :-)

I installed Arch in 2004, and I haven't hopped since. I was trapped in Ubuntu for a short while once, when I had a new work laptop where for some reason I couldn't get Arch installed, but when I tried again a couple of months later, it all worked. So I guess the answer is: for 19 years.

Archlinux. Many years ago, not sure exactly when, but more than 10years. Last distro I really used before Arch was ZenWalk, slackware based. Arch was the only one that after many tries and over the years remains the most consistent, simple and reliable that I can manage without much effort.

After using on my personal computers Arch I still tried and used on the work machines Ubuntu lts releases. It gave so much problems that I just now use Arch everywhere and anytime I get a new work machine it's what gets installed too.

I have to say that I was a serious heavy distro hoper back in the days and tried basically everything that existed. Just not gentoo. But fedoras, mandrakes, mandrivas, knopix, slackware, bsd, suse, etc, I regularly spent time with them all and was changing a lot and tried many new releases. The longest I've been with a distro was ZenWalk, more than a year or 2 and then Arch appeared on my radar and once I jumped ship, never got the need for anything else.

Edit: Checked some math I think I use arch more than 15years now.

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).

Started with Gentoo. Used it until dependency hell broke my system hard enough that I had to reformat. Since I’m a PowerShell developer, I went with Ubuntu since that gets official support. I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of cool stuff, but it’s a stable system with an excellent package selection.

Gentoo cured me of distrohopping back in 2009. Before my computer died in 2018 I was still running the same install for 9 years. My current Gentoo install is only 3 years and change old, though.

I was on Manjaro for several years at one point. I like Mint for now but I'm not in love with Cinnamon. I kinda want to rapid fire test a bunch of DEs in VMs to see what I like nowadays.