Linux

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.

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

Workstations:

I've been using Fedora since 2014, so coming up on a decade. Runner up would be Arch for about three years from 2011-2014. Before that it was a blur of distro hopping.

Servers:

Been using a combination of RHEL and CentOS since 2011, so about twelve years. And yes, I'm still using CentOS even though it's no longer a rebuild of RHEL. I actually think it's better now, because bugs can actually be fixed instead of being closed as "reproducible on RHEL".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

Probably like half a year on Mint. Don't know for certain.
I'm currently on Tumbleweed which is pretty good, though I do have some minor issues which make me want to just switch to Debian. I do work on this machine, so even minor issues are pretty damn annoying for me.

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.

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.

I used Kububtu between 2008 and around 2013, then got so fed up with KDE4 bugs I switched to Xubuntu, and am using that ever since.

So that's 10 or 15 years depending how you count.

When I want to play, I start a VM, base OS needs to be rock solid.

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

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'm pretty new to Linux, committed to it 2021 and last changed to EndeavorOS (basically an arch installer + a few quality of life packages) around one and a half years ago. It recently broke on my desktop (btrfs disk full, though it didn't show as full, during update. And my snapshots were setup incorrectly). Looking into trying out NixOS on it now, my Laptop will stay EndeavorOS for the foreseeable future though.

On the desktop side, I used Slackware for about 7 years, then switched to Ubuntu for another 15 years, and recently years used Debian and Tails (after suffering several government-level hacking operations). I basically use Ubuntu for servers, I'm thinking about Debian or OpenBSD.

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

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).

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.

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.

Two decades.

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.