There are a bunch of software-related reasons why openSUSE is a good choice (snapper, zypper, yast, to name a few), although few are exclusive to openSUSE. I think the primary selling point of openSUSE (Tumbleweed) is that it is a rolling release distro that never crashes, never requires attention, and just works. One of the reasons people don't talk about it is probably that it is boring. All packages are tested extensively. It never breaks. And even if it did break, the default btrfs file system and snapper ensure that the system doesn't stay broken for longer than it takes to reboot.

If you want a distro that is up to date, easy to use, and dependable, openSUSE is a fantastic choice. It's just not very exciting to have something that never requires attention; a lot of people use Linux because they like things requiring attention.

As an afterthought, I also think the fact that openSUSE and its users seem to be pathologically unable to create any logo or symbol for anything even tangentially related to the distribution that doesn't look like absolute shit might be holding them back.

Opensuse tumbleweed is probably the most stable rolling release, so you get the newest software without everything breaking. Also Yast is an amazing utility that allows you to administer your system entirely with a GUI

Tumbleweed is rock solid. I took out an old Intel based Macbook that has not been updated in two years (I stopped traveling for work and no longer needed a laptop so the software got outdated). OpenSuse Tumbleweed updated flawlessly. It switched to the newest gcc, switched over to pipewire, etc. without a single issue. I did not read the latest news as I used to do on Arch.

Also, OpenSuse is a family of distros. Choose what works for you. Tumbleweed is the main product and the base of all Suse offerings (and I recommend it).

• Tumbleweed rolls similarly to Arch but has more QA testing
• Slowroll is just snapshots of Tumbleweed that are updated less frequently. May replace Leap.
• Leap does traditional releases similar to other OSes such as Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu
• MicroOS (and its flavors) update the same way Android does; as a full image. You could pick a MicroOS flavor such as Aeon (Gnome) or Kalpa (KDE) and stick to Flatpaks which as a strategy works great on the Steamdeck but I have yet to try it on desktop.

As someone who has tried several Linux distributions what was important to me was how stable updates were. On that old Macbook, that I used for ten years; I mostly used Chakra, Arch, and Tumbleweed. That Tumbleweed install was at least six years old.

I did have one issue, but it was a kernel introduced bug. Long since fixed. Someone messed up Apple EFI boot; so I had to load the EFI menu when booting and then select my internal SSD to start the OS.

Automated package testing before each update rolls out to users.

In the event that an update does break your system, you can roll back to the last snapshot from the grub menu (using the smart btrfs setup that is the installation default).

Also generally, maintained by very smart people, community is not toxic, corporate overlords more benign than most, IMO.

I've been using oS:TW for over a year now. It's extremely stable for a rolling release distro. Plus if something does break, snapper rollbacks from the grub menu are set up by default. I've only had rollback once though due to a fucky Nvidia update.

Thanks for asking the question. Apparently I need to check out opensuse!

It was the only distro that worked out of the box with my laptop. Everything else for some reason would crash when returning from hibernate/lid close. I was a long time Ubuntu user years ago that went back to windows when 7 came out. 11/copilot/recall was a step too far so I decided to go back. No dice with Ubuntu, Manjaro, arch, popos, mint, Ubuntu again etc etc. Suse just worked. I have leap (just updated to 15.6 last night) on my main laptop and tumbleweed on my travel laptop. I'm very happy with them both.

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.

Only community distro that has a fully a path to fully FOSS commercially supported Linux (no proprietary package repo like Ubuntu with snap, no EULA limiting your 4 software freedoms ala Redhat).

I'm also interested in openSUSE, but what held me back from Tumbleweed was the statement on their Wiki: "If you don't know how to compile your own additional kernel modules and you don't wish to learn or keep a very close eye on what is being updated, please don't use Tumbleweed." (https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed)

But here people say it "just works" and it's a great distro. I'm torn :), I'd like to try it, but I'm not sure I wanna follow all updates all the time to make sure it runs fine.

but I rarely see much talk about openSUSE.

Probably because most of the openSUSE users talk in German elsewhere.