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.

  • devtoolkit_api@discuss.tchncs.de
    61·
    3 hours ago

    Community distros can absolutely be stable long-term. Some concrete examples:

    Community distros that have lasted 20+ years:

    • Debian (1993) — The gold standard. Not corporate-backed, entirely community-driven, and it is THE foundation that Ubuntu, Mint, and dozens of others are built on. If Debian ever disappeared, we would have way bigger problems.
    • Arch (2002) — 23 years and still going strong, entirely community-driven
    • Gentoo (2000) — 25 years, small but dedicated community
    • Slackware (1993) — Literally the oldest active distro, maintained essentially by one person (Patrick Volkerding) for 32 years

    Corporate distros that actually died or pivoted:

    • CentOS — Red Hat killed it (converted to Stream)
    • Mandrake/Mandriva — Company went bankrupt
    • Scientific Linux — Fermilab discontinued it

    The takeaway: corporate backing is not a guarantee of stability. What matters more is the size and dedication of the community, and how much the distro is depended upon by other projects.

    For your situation, Debian Stable is probably the safest bet. It is conservative, well-tested, and has the largest community behind it. You can run the same Debian install for a decade with just dist-upgrades.