I've had CachyOS on a secondary drive to about 10 months. That's longer than normal, but I really liked CachyOS, when I first installed it, so I wanted to keep it around. Unfortunately, I just kind of stopped using it. It doesn't really run better then my main Tumbleweed. Game performance is nice, on paper, but I can't tell a difference in reality. It also uses zram, which is properly configured, and just slams my SWAP (because it's not intended to be used with a SWAP). Well, the SWAP is there, because it's part of my Tumbleweed set up and CachyOS just picks it up automatically. It's a great distro, very well thought out, just not my style I guess. My wife uses it on her PC and loves it.

The longest I have gone without updating a Tumbleweed desktop (that I used daily) was about 2 months. It worked perfectly fine, didn't cause any issues. So... I waited 2 months and I'll update CachyOS to see how it goes, as a final test. I'll follow the manual changes as required, it's not like I'm skipping anything or intentionally trying to break it. I just want to compare. I think that's a fair test. I have a custom JeOS image of Tumbleweed I use as a base for my VM's and it's almost 5 years old, it updates fine every time I reuse it. I'm not pushing CachyOS to that level, because it would take a month to track down all of the many changes, it's not meant to work like that. I'm am 100% confident a Tumbleweed desktop would still work though.

I want to try Fedora 44 and Ubuntu 26.04 next. It's been a while since I tested either of those (probably 2024, honestly). I'll probably just run them for a week or 2 each. Then I want to try using archinstall, which I've never done - I normally do it the Arch way - and follow that up with a kind of Frankenstein with CachyOS packages, namely the kernel. I'm curious how a default configured Arch would compare to CachyOS. That's probably all about a month, which is what I typically run a single distro for testing. If I like the Arch install, I may keep it longer. My end goal, this time, is to give Gentoo a try again and run it for an extended period like I tried to do with CachyOS (to be fair I did use it quite a bit in the beginning, it just faded down the stretch).

After running Gentoo for a while, I want to start over trying some distros I haven't tried in a very long while. Maybe Mint? Or LMDE? Maybe Parrot. Possibly Garuda (which I hated years ago when I used it for an extended period - was the slowest/sluggiest distro I've ever tried). It's probably been 6 years since I've tried any of those. Anyway, the next extended use distro, after Gentoo, is planned to be NixOS. I always plan this stuff out and then get distracted or something, so feel free to expect me to be running NixOS next week lol