> I suppose this is what happened with CF bulbs? We were promised longer bulb life, but in practice I find that I have to change CF bulbs far more often than traditional fluorescent tubes.

CF bulbs were sold as having long life compared to the incandescent bulbs they were drop-in replacements for, not compared to flourescent tubes.

I think a lot of CFL lifetime depends on the quality of your electricity. In my last place, I had some that lasted 8 years including some high-usage lights like in the livingroom that saw at least 3 - 5 hours of daily use.

Though I always purchased name-brand bulbs, never the cheap generic brands.

I left them all behind when I moved so those are the longest lived ones I have experience with, in my new house, I have mostly LED's with a few CFL's and they're up to around 5 years old... I like the light from LED's better or I'd have more CFL's around.

Failures have been rare, but I have pretty clean power, few power outages and practically no thunderstorms in the area.

Interestingly enough, in one apartment I had a particular fixture that would burn out incandescent bulbs extremely quickly. I put in a CFL and never had to replace it again. No idea what was going on there.

This has to do with the starter mechanism. All florescent tubes need a starter, including CFLs. Industrial/commercial florescent lights take a few seconds to warm up, often with some flickering. For home use people want their light bulbs to start up fast, so manufacturers put quicker starters in CFLs at the expense of longevity.

Your information is out of date by a few decades or so.

Ballast + starter is completely outdated and the only reason you still see them is in places where they don't care about energy costs and because hardware stores still sell them (along all the other junk products found in hardware stores) — they are marginally cheaper.

Combine a fluorescent tube with a hot-start electronic ballast and you get lights that are cheaper than LEDs with similar efficiency and light quality (depending on the tubes), but lower eco-footprint and lower running costs (tubes are ~1-1.5 € each). Electronic ballasts are extremely reliable and have been on the market long enough to back such claims up.

Hot-start EVG doesn't turn on quite as fast as LEDs; they take about 0.5 seconds. They never flicker.