Just say the reason why you switched to opensuse.I switched to opensuse because Windows 7 crashed on me.I chose to run opensuse out of curiosity,now I will never go back.Thanks Novell for creating this awsome linux distro and thank you people useing it and giving help to newbies like me and keeping the distro alive.Peace out and down with windows.
Because I was already using SUSE - before that I used Caldera 
Well I didnāt really change, I used Slack before SuSE popped up and then have been using it ever since.
That the reason of many users hereā¦bad experience with windows! Linux is not un-crash-able, but the community does a good job! I love my new openSUSE 11.2 its so beautiful with KDE!
I am a very disapointed EX!-mandriva user. Will not go specific but I was very unhappy with 2010. Ubuntu is kind of windownized for me. I have big hopes on SUSE, im a newbe.
Just mucking about, trying out Linux, and SuSE was the only one I could get to install cleanly. I tried a couple of other distros but couldnāt understand how to push through the glitches in the installation (in those days they were not unusual).
āSwitchingā assumes that one has stopped using whatever it was they previously use, and replaced it with openSUSE. With that terminology, I havenāt switched to openSUSE; openSUSE was the first version of Linux that I learned, and has been my main system for well over 2 years. I have tied out various other Linux distributions, but Iāve always come back to openSUSE.
I havenāt stopped using Windows either. My mastery of Windows continues to be greater than my mastery of any form of Linux, and I havenāt had any issues with any version of Windows since 2002.
Switched in 2003 from Mandrake to SUSEā¦ reasons were mostly due to YaST at that time and the more professional look and workflow. Mandrake at that time was very poorly done when compared to a SUSE version of the same timeframeā¦ Been ever since on SUSE and kinda āspecializedā on it. I also have XP in a VM but only fire it up when I need to convert videoās for my portable flash player as its proprietary program does not run on anything else (donāt come around with WINE, it doesnāt work) and because the videoās it produces are some modified AVI files which no encoder on Linux can produce. Tried using them all to produce something my player will accept, but could never figure it out - the playerās encoder embeds some custom strings in the AVI produced which then the player looks for and if not found, refuses to play the fileā¦ talking of lock-ins 
Curiosity and experimentation mainly
I switched from Red Hat to openSUSE in 2001 mainly due to curiosity. I was no longer in the Windoze clutches, but I had not bothered to stay current with the latest Red Hat releases.
My Red Hat version was OLD (v.5.1) and it was either go for the latest Red Hat 7.0 or try something different. I was a relatively new expat living Germany, and knew that SuSE had good english language support, so I thought that I would give a German based distribution a try. Since SuSE-7.3, I have not switched to another distribution (although I have played with some on a sandbox PC).
My reasons for staying with SuSE/openSUSE, of course were different than my reasons for originally trying SuSE.
Beacuasse i broked my Kubuntu several timesā¦ And when Ubuntu starts getting many new features that kubuntu doesnt i felt like it was time to test something newā¦
Tested mandriva first but it looked dead ugly and I had some problems with sound and suchā¦
Then it was time for Suse now the only thing bothering me is the graphics card driversā¦ But that should be solved by manual install soonā¦
On Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:46:01 +0000, stonba wrote:
> Just say the reason why you switched to opensuse.I switched to opensuse
> because Windows 7 crashed on me.I chose to run opensuse out of
> curiosity,now I will never go back.Thanks Novell for creating this
> awsome linux distro and thank you people useing it and giving help to
> newbies like me and keeping the distro alive.Peace out and down with
> windows.
I was working for Novell when SuSE became a part of Novell; Iād been
using RedHat for several until that point, but wanted to learn about our
new products - and incorporate them into the class I was then teaching on
RedHat. 
Iāve never looked back.
Jim
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Moderator
On 2009-11-15, stonba <stonba@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
> Just say the reason why you switched to opensuse.I switched to opensuse
> because Windows 7 crashed on me.I chose to run opensuse out of
> curiosity,now I will never go back.Thanks Novell for creating this
> awsome linux distro and thank you people useing it and giving help to
> newbies like me and keeping the distro alive.Peace out and down with
> windows.
Switched to SuSE when it became clear OS/2 would not run on new hardware.
Had taken a look at Linux vaguely, at about release 6.2. Also bought 6.4.
When I made the final switch, it was SuSE 7.1.
Picked SuSE because it had better hardware support than other distroās.
ā¦ and because it was European:
- good language support
- local product
- German efficiency (but then some burk sold out)
- not French (unlike another popular distro of the time)
- not Red Hat (was too MS-like)
ā¦ AND because I met Linus at a local Linux userās group (called Iguana) which
allready used that gekko logo. (or a lizard, close enough).
Iām still with it, because I used to run some Netware servers. Novellās not
to bad - for a US business.
ā
Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked
something.
Iāve been using openSUSE as my main system since February of this year.
Before that I was strictly a Windows user except for the occasional stab at Linux which always ended up in frustration.
Then a very patient person helped me get started with openSUSE and basically held my hand for the first month or so.
I was careful to take notes so I didnāt have to ask twice for the same thing.
I have since tried every mainstream Linux distro and while I liked Mint, Mandriva, and Kubuntu none have been as satisfying as openSUSE mainly because I like the way way Yast and the software management system work.
I have been in this forum for quite a while now.(Even though I havenāt got much post counts I know! :P) Last year I tried out openSUSE for the first time and was really disappointed with it. It was slow and buggy. KDE 4.1 was at flaw. Besides yaST was really really slow for me.
So, my friend suggested me ubuntu. Right there I started disliking Gnome. KDE was the thing for me. I started hanging out in various IRCs and Forums only to find out that these graphical distros are ridiculed by the so called āadvanced distroā users. SO I wanted to check out what the fuss was all about.
I started using slackware. . Then moved to Arch and then Gentoo. While Arch was really awesome, Gentoo was just intolerable for me.
I still use Arch with openbox and xmonad. After checking out openSUSEās reviews, and seeing the Firefox/openoffice-KDE integration, I was simply drooling! It was great and I had to try out!
Guess what? SUSE had changed a huge deal over the last year. yaST is finally working fine for me. And KDE is no longer buggy. Itās quite stable and nobody does better a KDE implementation than openSUSE. It is a well known fact! Thanks for all your hard work. Keep it up! I am loving openSUSE!
Regards
Youāve been trolled by these āadvanced distroā users who live in their own little world and it seems you took the bite 
Did you also compile your Gentoo with -O100 -ZOMG-SUPER-FAST? lol!
Well the thing is that, I learnt so much about linux by using these āadvanced distrosā. However, now I wanted to settle for something which does the job easily and maintains a balance between productivity,functionality and of course look and appearance is something which is highly desired. openSUSE 11.2 is providing me all these and Iām quite happy with it. I have also taken an interest in OBS and would like to get involve and contribute. I also have no idea about RPM building so will have to read up on that. Lack of time right now, but will get to it eventually.
Regards
My post wasnāt mean to say that you shouldnāt use such distros and I already knew even before you posted that people who use them tend to learn much more, often the hard wayā¦ it was meant to be sarcastic
Being an I.T. guy, I thought I needed to broaden my horizons. I started looking for a distro. Loaded Gentoo the hard way first. Played with it for a few hours and blew it out and installed Red Hat. A few hours later, I blew that one out and installed SuSE 9.1 with KDE and fell in love.
That was a while back and since then, I have pretty much stuck with openSUSE. I am also a big fan of Arch, although I have not run it for about a year.
I sure did!lol!