i mean is a distro not made by a corp stable as in does it last years or do they often fail and vanish?

so i dont install a distro and customize it and all this and fine i need to move my whole digital life to new distro again.

  • davel@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Debian is 32 years old. Arch is 24 years old. Gentoo is 23 years old. Alpine is 20 years old.

  • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
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    2 months ago

    The smaller/newer distros have no evidence of staying around for years, so it’s hard to judge whether they’ll be around in another couple years. Distros like Bazzite are definitely interesting, but you can’t reliably predict whether it’ll get updates in 10 years. There are stable community-led distros that have been around for a long time, like Debian.

  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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    2 months ago

    Pretty much all ‘major’ distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSuse…) have 20+ years on their belt and none of those are not likely to go away any time soon. Some niche variants of those might vanish, but the main distributions will be there.

  • atk007@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Depends really. Small community distros serve a purpose as they either provide some niche configurations or pre-installed software that major distros don’t, or they are made because they are trying to fork a major distros that is becoming too corporate with risk of becoming less open source. Now within community distros there are reputations. Debian is famously a community driven distro that hundreds of other distros are based on, and so is arch. They are pretty stable and will last more and more. Also, corporate distro doesn’t guarantee longevity or stability either, because there are several corporate projects that get abandoned and are picked up by communities.