Hi ivom66,
Thanks for the review. Was an interesting read.
I can relight to your opinion of openSUSE not being as easy as Ubuntu. But I also take in account that you are coming from a place where you are known with many ins and outs of Ubuntu and have a basic idea of how to do things in and around openSUSE.
For me the experience was the other way around, I got to learn and love YaST and that put me off using many other distributions until I got the true basics of Linux.. then it was a better comparison, but I still prefer openSUSE overall... it's a matter of perspective I guess
For the multimedia, Ubuntu has an easy install, but so does openSUSE;
Restricted Formats - openSUSE-Community
It's your one-click stop to get things setup.
One thing that is amazing in openSUSE 11 (compaired to previous openSUSE versions) is the package manager. I can safely say it's on pair with apt. Speed and ease of use are both there, and for me YaST again wins. But that is my preference.
I think if one would truly step in blank into Ubuntu, or step in blank to openSUSE.. who knows which of the two would win. I think YaST is a big plus though.
In the end it's about enjoying what you use and being to do what you need and want...
If you give openSUSE 11 a go, give it a bit more time to sink in and don't focus to find specific Ubuntu trades in openSUSE. Do it the SUSE way
As we say here : have allot of fun!
Cheers,
Wj