First, let me be clear up front that I’m not promoting the idea that there should be one “universal” Linux distro. With all the various distros out there for consumers, there’s lots of discussion about Arch, Debian, and Fedora (and their various descendant projects), but I rarely see much talk about openSUSE.

Why might somebody choose that one over the others? What features or vision distinguishes it from the others?

Edit: I love all the answers! Great stuff. Thanks to everyone!

  • boredsquirrel
    7•6 months ago

    I have the same result in my current survey. Nobody openly talks about OpenSUSE a lot.

    That doesnt mean they dont have many users, but they are not really active in general online forums.

    There was also not a lot of people moving from it to something else.

    OpenSUSE to SEL is similar to Fedora to RHEL. I dont know why Fedora gets more focus.

    This is often random, and I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed may be better than traditional Fedora, as they use BTRFS snapshots automatically.

    Meanwhile, Fedora Atomic Desktops are WORLDS better than their Kalpa and Aeon, and you can also see that by their forks /variants.

    OpenSUSE has Aeon and the barely maintained Kalpa, Fedora has tons of variants and way more inofficial ones. Especially uBlue made cool user accessible tooling and they are good at shipping tailored distros like Bazzite or Bluefin/Aurora.