Yeah, qt can even nicely emulate GTK+ themes. 
The main reason for me is zypper. As a long time Debian user I was very satisfied with apt, and apt does mostly a good job. But there is no visible improvement since years from user sight. Discovering zypper was delightful for me. Zypper is imho one or two steps beyond apt. Many features I missed with apt are included in zypper. And he is fast, maybe even faster than pacman. Sure, there are some things Iām still missing in zypper, e.g. showing estimating total download time or removing patterns with all dependencies. But Iām sure this will be some time implemented. I never use Yast for installing packages or system updates, maybe one if I discover it by browsing packages.
But the best software manager is nothing without a good repo structure behind it. And that is another point for openSUSE. Besides the standard repos, OBS and therefore many repos with nearly each open source software leaves nothing to be desired.
And my last, but not least, reasons for openSUSE are that it is well documented and the huge community.
I did find myself jumping to the terminal and using zypper rather than waiting for Yast, but Yast will be useful for some of my network settings in a while.
I told only about software management. There I prefer zypper.
And yes, Yast is useful for different settings when you are not familiar how to manage it manually. Complex network settings is one thing I do not like too, because Iām not very interested in learning their administration in depth. In those cases Yast is very helpful.
The openSUSE xfce support is good, + yast+ zypper+ lots of choices of WM & DE and the community support is terrific.
Why not go with Tumbleweed, then?
Does openSUSE modify/customize Xfce much, or is it pretty much what you get upstream?
Not really, only the look, the character follows the openSUSE green colors and some menu modification.
The good thing with openSUSE xfce it is very easy to mix apps from gnome and kde because of the availability in the same repositories.
To add if you have the openSUSE x11 repositories the newest version of xfce when it is release, the maintainer is always quick to
update it in the repo.
I prefer gentoo on my everyday laptop because it have the best system of all distributions I know, but it is time consuming to manage, which is OK on my own laptop which is up half of the day. But for anything else openSUSE is the one I prefer. That because it is a good working, robust and easy to manage distro, and without talking of yast, but when using multiple repositories, an update will not start if they are not in sync. When such a thing append (update with not in sync repository), I will not give any distro name here because it was several years ago and maybe they fixed the issue, the result was a fully broken system.
No, it is not because of Yast. As a longtime Debian user I am used to the command line but it is also nice to have a GUI for some settings, e.g. regarding /etc/sysconfig.
I am rather new to using OpenSUSE full time and it is some of the newer things that attracted me to it, like the new release model with Leap. Then a relatively recent Gnome 3 version and nice integration of it as Tumbleweed, a great rolling release.
[Tumbleweed]
remembering that the whole is greater than the sum of its partsā¦
kde plasma based - tasteful, configurable with great extended ecosystem
zypper is fantastic
btrfs and snapper rollbacks
best utilities - konsole, dolphin
well tested and reliable
On 2016-12-02, Domisol <Domisol@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com> wrote:
>
> I prefer gentoo on my everyday laptop because it have the best system of all distributions I know, but it is time
> consuming to manage, which is OK on my own laptop which is up half of the day.
Gentoo may be the best system of distributions you know but that would be for your specific purposes. I have the
opposite arrangement with Gentoo on desktops and openSUSE on laptops and also on all desktops as a backup system.
Certainly Gentoo is the most customisable system and there are many areas (e.g. high-performance workstations) where
such a high-maintenance GNU/Linux distribution genuinely translates to tangible benefits but I really canāt see how this
could be the case for laptopsā¦ the thought all that kernel module recompiling to manage drivers peculiar to laptops
properly makes me shudder!
> But for anything else openSUSE is the one I prefer. That because it is a good working, robust and easy to manage
> distro, and without talking of yast, but when using multiple repositories, an update will not start if they are not in
> sync. When such a thing append (update with not in sync repository), I will not give any distro name here because it
> was several years ago and maybe they fixed the issue, the result was a fully broken system.
I believe openSUSE has a number of strengths that sets it apart from the rest:
- YaST.
- OBS.
- DE ambivalence.
- Enterprise-level professionalism.
- Full LSB support.
ā¦ thatās why every I machine I own/administrate has at least one copy of openSUSE on it - it just works.
Sure, Portage in Gentoo is a miracle worker handling source compiles and without any rival when it comes to compiling
your way out of trouble (which is why a source distribution provides a much better framework for rolling releases in my
opinion). But occasionally it takes a very long time (especially when attempting an emerge -DaquN --with-bdeps=y @world)
before you have a usable system during which time mission-critical function is compromised. The voodoo fun that is
Gentoo is the need of wielding just the right black magic during updates to maintain a balanced karma between compiled
packages. By contrast `zypper upā is openSUSE very rarely causes problems. It may be a binary distribution but it is the
best of them.
I think this bug report makes the point very well 
: 100715 ā Guide for keeping system in top shape