How long have you run a single Linux install without reinstalling?

Sticky

More of a conversational question here...

How long have you had a single consistent installation? We're all guilty of a little distro-hoping, but I always find myself back home with Solus. Those of you a bit more stable than me, have you been able to maintain one install on one machine for over a year?

brent

Sticky Those of you a bit more stable than me, have you been able to maintain one install on one machine for over a year

Current Solus? _ couple years or more_. even cloned the same install when it was time to get another SSD.

they key to hopping/having fun? a dedicated partition on the same disk or another disk altogether.

that guarantees one never actually leaves Solus as no matter what i try Solus will always be stabler.

Staudey

Sticky Those of you a bit more stable than me, have you been able to maintain one install on one machine for over a year?

Since I use my machines to get work done and not solely for checking out new distros, yes, all my installations are more than a year old. The one I'm typing this from was set up in March 2019, for example.

(btw you can get a pretty accurate idea of the age of your Solus installation by running

eopkg hs | grep -C3 "Operation #1:"

to see the date of the first eopkg operation)

Original-Syn

My main systems I rarely change, but I recently did as I moved to Solus. On the desktop, I have run systems for 4+ years without reinstalling both with Fedora/Ultramarine and EndeavourOS.

I have several old laptops, from 7th gen intel to more recent ones. Those are where I will test out things and play with other distros. Currently I have one XPS 13 (2017) running the new KDE Linux. Another XPS 13 (2018) running AerynOS. My main desktops and laptops will remain on Solus, with 1 of each being on the Unstable repo. I have a mini lab and VM lab for other testing and compiling.

So I still feed my need to explore, but have my main systems all on Solus, for which they will stay until something happens that causes me to move. Hoping that will not happen.

On a side note about distro-hopping, I found one of my old journals from the 90s and early 2000s where I logged my testing back then. Going through that along with my memory of others I have tested, I am around 135 distinct ditstros I have tested. Not 100% accurate on the count as I tried some truly small distros.

brent

Original-Syn but have my main systems all on Solus, for which they will stay until something happens that causes me to move. Hoping that will not happen

one dedicated and one for exploration seems the only sensible way, agreed

Sticky

....guess i'm a bit neurotic by comparison. Years on one install? Impressive.

Axios

I think this laptop is 2021 just keep updating and going on.
(Budgie)

elfprince

Several years, lost track, running Solus on my main nuc pc, without reinstalling.

carlberger

My work laptop has Ubuntu Budgie since 6.5 years. Runs mighty fine, its a Lenovo T480.
My newest laptop has Solus since 4 weeks. ( The newest tuxedo InfinityBook 15 AMD, makes compiling rust a sheer joy )
The one before that still has the original installed Solus since Feb 2019. And the one before that runs Solus since sometime in 2016. Its not that used often, but I keep it up to date as a backup system for my father.

I check the installation time by the the time the filesystem was created:

sudo tune2fs -l /dev/"Your HD ID here" | grep 'Filesystem created:'

which of course does not mean it was the installation time of the OS. It is though on my machines.

@Staudey the "eopkg hs" command runs only when setting the LANG=en_US ( or something else english ) like

LANG=en_US eopkg hs | grep -C3 "Operation #1:"

which is also true for my command 🙂

Staudey

carlberger the "eopkg hs" command runs only when setting the LANG=en_US ( or something else english )

Yes. One could also get away with a shortened version like

eopkg hs | grep -C3 "#1:"

Not sure if other languages replace the numbers sign with something else, but I hope that part stays the same.

synth-ruiner

My Solus installation on my desktop has been in place since 2019. I think at some point I had to chroot to fix something, but other than that it's basically been smooth sailing.

I set up a couple of Alpine virtual servers in 2020 and they're going strong too.

brent

synth-ruiner I set up a couple of Alpine virtual servers in 2020 and they're going strong too.

that OS has come a long way. might be the only true server that is proud to be a desktop. weren't too refined in 2019/2020 but it's a sleek thing now. Never got used to DOAS I install sudo pretty early 🙂

AlphaElwedritsch guys, you are all soooo boring ... 🤣

my breaking-stuff-constantly-living-on-the-edge part of my Linux journey quietly morphed into a love for stability 😉

AlphaElwedritsch

guys, you are all soooo boring ... 🤣

AlphaElwedritsch

you speak from my heart

Solarmass

My most oldest installation is no longer with us. IIRC I had to reinstall it because of switching to EFI from grub. Don't worry I have another old Solus Budgie installation 😎

For testing distros I have a spare SSD and VM.