The above posts in this thread do a reasonably good job of describing differences between SLES/SLED, LEAP and Tumbleweed, but to my knowledge (I don’t profess to have any insider info) a few points should be corrected or clarified…
LEAP and SLES are roughly on the same release schedule and more or less share core components, but the integration of SLES components into LEAP is an ongoing effort. Do not think that LEAP core is the same as SLES today.
Once upon a time before the effort to integrate SLES and LEAP, openSUSE up to 13.2 probably had more in common with Tumbleweed and vice versa. In fact Tumbleweed had an official role as the “Factory” where new versions and modifications in the OS and applications were tested before accepted into “stable” openSUSE. With the integration of SLES and LEAP, I don’t think that under the hood LEAP has the same close relationship with Tumbleweed, so Tumbleweed has had to modify its role and relationship with LEAP. Tumbleweed has continued to be a “Rolling release” which means that it performs full system upgrades instead of incremental updates. Tumbleweed is more accepting of wholesale changes to its parts without reservation compared to LEAP (and SLES) efforts to slow the pace of change, with largely few kernel and framework changes. If you’re using LEAP but want to use only a few of the latest available technology, you can add a repo that provides only those changes instead of undergoing turbulent changes to everything. In other words, there is considerable flexibility how much stability or change you want in your system to support numerous use scenarios.
BTW - Yes, Tumbleweed should be expected to require multiple gigabytes of data upgrading each month. It’s a reflection of the many changes the system undergoes continuously and is a visible difference from LEAP might more typically might require only about a half gigabyte of updates in a busy month.
As for stability…
For as much change that happens on Tumbleweed, it’s remarkable how few bugs we see, and that is due to OpenQA, our automated testing. I wonder how rolling releases in other distros do their testing, I can’t see how they can exist without what is done for Tumbleweed (and Factory)
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:OpenQA
Status
https://openqa.opensuse.org/
But, don’t be misled by how reliable Tumbleweed appears to be, just by the pure number of changes there is considerable additional risk so I would not recommend it for Line of Production use and as a HostOS for Production use. If a Tumbleweed issue is discovered and fixed within a few days or week, there is a considerable difference between a User losing functionality for that time vs an entire business or multiple essential virtual machines.
Comparing Windows support vs Linux support is almost a subjective experience, IMO the main difference is that even so-called Windows techs are more often than not less skilled for numerous reasons. I have seen and experienced complex difficult problems on Windows the same as I’ve found on Linux. If talking about DevOps, I don’t know that there is any difference doing it well… As always there are plusses and minuses in each environment and different available tools.
Regarding WINE,
AFAIK it provides approximately a Win7 environment, more or less.
In other words, less than what you’d find pushing a Win10 to its limits but adequate for a great many apps.
If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, keep an eye on what Microsoft is doing for Windows/Linux integration, it’s changing rapidly. Microsoft has been submitting plenty of code to the Linux kernel and now includes a full Linux kernel running side by side with the Windows kernel. Full GPU support was announced for WSL recently but without comment pulled back and didn’t release on schedule. There has even been far out there speculation that Microsoft intends to eventually reverse WSL and run Windows on a Linux code base recently (Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it).
Any comments about applications that have anything to do with proprietary licensed apps or components like transcoding should be reminded that unlike most/many other distros, SUSE/openSUSE has a very strict policy on licensing so unless you install from non-openSUSE repos like Packman, your app won’t likely work correctly.
Bottom line is that if anything doesn’t work exactly as it should, don’t rely on help on other places like Reddit, Stackexchange or other distro forums… The help there might be good or it might not. Ask in these openSUSE forums, the IRC channel or various openSUSE mailing lists
https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Support
TSU