Reading this (and other) forum(s) for years, I have found there is a lot of misinformation about openSUSE.
Many years back, possibly the transitions that took place during openSUSE-10.0 and 10.1 caused a lot of people to test openSUSE (with the Novell acquisition) and for a brief time openSUSE had a massive following, but that was brief as many then left openSUSE due to the 10.1 project management disaster, and the 10.0/10.1 removal of many proprietary applications/drivers causing many frustration. Especially wrt the 10.1 project management fiasco, I’ve read of users put down openSUSE-10.3, 11.0, 11.1 etc claiming the project management no good, even thou they never tried those versions. They just ‘assume’ there was no change.
Even with 12.x, in our GNU/Linux club, many had not heard of zypper, and claimed openSUSE had the worst software management ever, until I provided some a demo which convinced them otherwise.
Then many put down openSUSE because of Novell’s patent deal with Microsoft (where that deal went well beyond GNU/Linux) . Many who have never taken the time to research, still think openSUSE is owned by Microsoft - something that could not be further from the truth.
openSUSE has also had its share of packaging hiccups, especially wrt Networking and less so, but still there, wrt the graphics migration (where graphics has changed significantly the past few years) a number of users with custom graphic hardware struggled. Many simply could not adjust to the changes, and the changes were not always fully automatic.
Multimedia is a sore point for many, as an incredible number of new users have never realized how incredibly simple it is to add the Packman repos and obtain superb multimedia for openSUSE. Those who do finally remove a mental block and add the Packman repos, then scream this must be automatic, while they have no idea as the risk of a law suit (bankrupting SuSE-GmbH) if this sort of addition is made the quasi-automatic way like they would prefer.
The openSUSE advantages of SuSE-Studio and the Build Service are simply not understood by the vast majority of new users. Instead the massive number of repositories available to provide openSUSE packages, simply confuse new users, who go hog wild and add a totally inappropriate number of repositories from arguably questionable mix of sources - causing their openSUSE to be unstable. The fact that THEY added the repositories does not change in their mind their inappropriate blame and provision of inappropriate claims of openSUSE stability.
wrt openSUSE stability, my 87-year old mother (soon to be 88) has been an openSUSE user for over 5 years, and her PC has never enjoyed as much stability, as she has on her PC(s) with openSUSE.
My view is similar to that of many, that users should use the OS and (if GNU/Linux is their OS) the GNU/Linux distro of their choice. I still think the best GNU/Linux distro is the one where one knows (is acquainted with) the most people who can provide support. In my case, that means openSUSE (due to the internet friends and acquaintances I have met over the past > 10 years of my using SuSE-Pro/openSUSE).
