Hi, I’m a Ubuntu user. A few days ago I decided to try openSuse and loved it.
THe thing is, I need to know if it is as easy (painless) to update to a new version as Ubutnu.
Most OpenSUSE users do a reinstall on version upgrade, but preserving /home, although the possibility has existed for a long time for doing an upgrade from the install media (downtime required). Until 11.0 there was no way of upgrading in-situ as can be done with Debian and Ubuntu. This is partly because OpenSUSE is playing catch up as for many years SUSE was not distributed over the Internet. So while the facility is there now (zypper dup), this has not been well exercised and on its first run from 11.0 to 11.1, many people reported issues. No doubt this will improve with time.
So for the time being the answer is no, it is not as easy as Ubuntu.
SuSE always permitted an upgrade, but as part of an installation process, and there were in past, considerable release notes on issues about the process. That said, in general, the upgrade was not particularly trusted. Most experienced users, preferred a clean install and configure system services again, just re-using the user settings in /home.
In general upgrading with YaST should work (though perhaps be slower than fresh install), if you just use software from the official repositories (and the community repositories that support both versions?). If you tend to grab software from other resources, very likely you’ll have unsolvable dependancy problems on an upgrade. Frequently the state was rather self-inflicted by short term, unclean short cuts like using rpm --force, to quickly install software and over-ride dependancy checks.
SuSE actually was available on the Internet via download, but not simultaneously with the boxset release.
You have to remember SuSE goes back a long way, before broadband links were widespread. One thing people liked about SuSE in ye olde days was that a lot of software came with it, you got up to 8 CDs in the box set.