Hello rotfl!
I am a pharmacy student from Greece. I started using linux from like 15, when ubuntu 10 was out, but not for long, especially when unity DE came out. This year I have been active again mainly using Fedora (Mate) but experimented with other distros too, lubuntu, mint, manjaro, salix os, I even installed arch in an old pc (it only worked after the 4rth installation attempt lol). Fedora is my favourite so far but in my search for a suitable distro for studying (mainly office and some chemistry applications) I decided to try opensuse leap KDE since I found this distro to be very promising especially Leap with all these “stable and mature” adjectives all around the web.
I installed Leap on my Dell Inspiron 5558, I liked the installer a lot, it allows you to configure lots of stuff, the partioner was not very easy but overall the installer looked great…except some things:
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1)**there was no indicator of what input language you are using. I use english and greek input languages so when i was prompt to enter my user account credentials like user name and password I wanted to see the input language. This is an issue in the KDE login screen too. You can choose the workspace, you can choose if you want to power off or reboot… But there is no indicator of the language you are using! This is something really basic and I think it is unacceptable for a moden GUI to not have this feature. Not that I cant live with this, it’s more like a detail but hey, details make the difference
**2)**there was no search box when searching in long lists like languages. Again, I wanted to add Greek as an input language through YaST, so i had to scroll down the entire list (which had languages NOT listed alphabetically but with a different filter and I dont know why) but in Fedora, in the controversial Anaconda installer (that i actually like a lot), you could just type your language and it would pop up so you could select it. And why I had to use YaST to add greek input language and I did not added greek from the installer? Because when I was adding greek from the installer, when installation was finished and i was about to enter my password in the kde login screen, my password was for some reason always “incorrect”.
How do I know all the above are issues? Scientific method: I have installed openSuse more than 7 times on my laptop.
Why?
Because:
**3)**there were a looot of issues (mainly graphical, like black squares behind some toolbar icons in libre office writer when using the default “breeze” icon theme) with the KDE plasma 5. For example after updating Leap, there were no X buttons on the notification windows when using the opensuse light theme (u could press the button but you couldnt see it). And when using the dark opensuse theme, the wifi/airplane-mode icons were invisible. (I repeat: "invisible, not hard to see). So i thought i should update my nvidia drivers because these nouveau drivers pop up lots of stuff too during logging in and out so I decided to try install nvidia drivers. I followed the official opensuse guide for installing the drivers. I did that in 2 installations. 1st time through the gui 2nd through konsole. Both times there was a blank screen after rebooting. There could be a fix, sure, but both times I removed Leap mostly because of frustration.
I have always been using gnome but with the introduction of gnome 3 i feel like this is a desktop environments for touchscreens not for classic desktops and laptops. Too big icons and buttons there. Mate is nice, with some effects but a bit old-looking in the current version. This is the first time i use KDE and i like the new look of it and it’s attention to visual details like the icons and menus…
So, other frustations include difficulty to install oracle’s java (required to run software like marvin sketch, chemdraw, schroedinger’s maestro, etc), random errors when installing packages with zypper, apps after installation didnt appear on the main menu except after 2-3 reboots or after installing another 2-3 apps (for example i installed kaffeine and kalzium and they did not appear until i installed vlc and yakuake)
I liked the fact that the media codecs were easy to install. No problems there.
There are lots of software in the repositories too. Not many good desktop and icon themes for the plasma 5 yet though.
Oh and there was no app for the camera out of the box. Not sure why.
I had trouble signing up in the forum. I had to create a “novell” account… And activation did not work the first time.
You know these little details make a difference. I choose linux because i want freedom and the ability to control everything in my computer and not the computer control me. But I also like stability and support and I perceive the word “stability” of an operating system as the ability to execute things properly and quickly enough and without crashes and blank screens or random “wrong password” pop ups. I have found other distributions with no emphasis on “stability” to be actually more “stable” with less issues. An issue is more frustating for me when it involves every-day simple tasks like invisible icons and all these weird stuff that should just work.
Even though I do not what the target audience of openSUSE Leap is, I believe it is a great and promising distro for everyone. I also hope it is not a “testing ground” for commercial products, that’s why I think about it twice now before i install fedora again, as it is said to be testing ground for RHEL…
Anyway that’s my opinion on the current openSUSE Leap distribution. Maybe i should try tumbleweed, i liked the live cd of the 2016 snapshot… That’s it, if someone read the whole post, thank you very much for your time cheers 
