Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Offers rock-stalbe Leap and rolling Tumbleweed variants
It gives you a choice between stability and bleeding edge
Pro Zypper and Yast2 give you incredible power and ease of use for installing and maintaining software
But with great power comes great responsibilities. It can be a challenge, even with an excellent package search tool (which tells which repo has the specific version — including community packages) to get some software to work. There needs to be better community packaging requirements and checks. If you put a piece of software in your community repository, you should either provide (and maintain) dependencies or be sure that your packages work with mainstream repositories.
KDE is the biggest challenge. The mainstream openSUSE repos don’t do a great job of including all of the KDE packages, and often there are version incompatibilities which result in KDE not starting or crashing. While it seems obvious, you need to install ALL KDE components which use the same version of the core KDE components. You cannot mix and match, and small version incompatibilities can wedge your system.
If you stay out of the community repos this isn’t an issue, but some people in the community repos feel that you should have access to the latest and greatest release without considering what will run without needing to install all of your KDE from a community release.
That said, if you stick to the core openSUSE repos, you can easily add the additional repositories (and there are a lot of them) pretty safely with confidence that whatever you install will run. Yast2 provides a reasonably powerful GUI on top of Zypper. Zypper isn’t all that hard to learn to use, but you lose the browsing ability you get with the GUI.
If you need to install software from non-openSUSE repos (e.g. RPMs) it usually works, provided that dependencies are the same version which is in openSUSE repos.
Compiling from source is just like any other distro. Usually, it works pretty well, and it is relatively easily to add any missing dependencies using Zypper without leaving BASH.
Pro Very easy (but not as easy as it used to be) installation
Yast does a good job w/ initial installation and set up. It used to be simple—far easier than installing Windows 10. It is a bit more clunky, and the key options when setting up (e.g. UEFI) are not present, which can lead to booting problems esp. dual booting w/ Windows 10. Also, WiFi isn’t easily configured w/ set up which leads to problem when you are doing a network installation.
Huge selection of software. With Yast2 all you need to do is check a box, and in the background the fantastic Zypper package manager figures out conflicts and dependancies.
Cons
Con Little Apache software, and no repo to make installation easy
You are left on your own, with a very convoluted web of symlinks for any Java software. While you can install httpd and there is a Yast2 GUI to run it, and you can install Tomcat, you are on your own for the rest of Apache. Given the huge range and high quality of most Apache projects, this makes setting up servers in particular dependent on the developers.
openSUSE should have a standard (i.e. non community) repository of current Apache projects, including Hadoop, and should develop/adept Yast2 GUI controls.
Con After choosing shutdown it does NOT shut the computer down, only logs out
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Pro One-Click install
Much better system then other distros for installing any package. It is as simple as clicking on one button and typing in your password. Adds a repo to your system keeping everything updated at the same time.
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Con The KDE version is buggy
openSUSE with KDE has beautiful icons, animations and familiar traditional PC environment, However, the confirm buttons are out of the screen in settings and sometimes the desktop is not responsive (terminal works).