Actually, the introduction of Windows started the process. Just could not stand it! I tried Apple, but a user interface consisting of monkey squeaks turned me off. I jumped on OS/2 and was very impressed. Developed a couple of small apps (programs) and thought it was the future. Turned out IBM changed their mind. Considered unix, but was just too expensive. So, I tried linux. The first distro that I could get to work was S.U.S.E. So, that’s the reason. Over the years I have, of course, tried other distros but have yet to find a reason to switch. In fact, this forum and the support available here is a major reason to stay with openSUSE.
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I started with Libranet and before it was discontinued I saw the new release of SUSE 9.1.
I tried it found the Yast and You and lilke it very much so I stayed with it for almost 20 years now.
I tried some distro but it didn’t last a week on my desktop. On top opensuse offer lots of DE’s that you
can choose and most of all xfce which I like the most is always up to date in opensuse. Have a lot of fun 
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Back in the day, while browsing software in a shop, I came in contact with a green-boxed version 9, I was impressed by the presence of a substantial manual so I decided to try it. It was a learning experience. Over the years I tested all distros under the sun but try as I may, I couldn’t stay away from that cute chameleon and I kept returning back time and time again. Tumbleweed is the reason I don’t distro-hop anymore.
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I started with Mandrake 8.1 in 2000. CNET called the user experience of Mandrake Linux 8.0 the most polished available at that time. IIRC, I had trouble with printing and video. I switched to SuSE as it was then called, and once I used YaST, I was hooked. I’m rather GUI inclined. I’ve always used the stable versions. I do not see the advantage of Tumbleweed, especially since so many forum entries are “I just updated TW and can’t boot” or “no wifi” or “no sound” and so forth. I’ve always been able to do everything I wanted with the stable versions, and they really are, even with updates.
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True, but Leap had a problem a while back where pc’s who only had intel igpu’s didn’t boot up. Sure, i had a sound issue with Tumbleweed, but i could roll it back and most of the issues are upstream issues .
I actually discovered openSUSE by accident while watching an LTT video (I don’t remember what it was called) and then about a year after I got my first desktop computer which had Windows for a while but then ‘stuff’ happened and I ended up putting Tumbleweed on it, fast forward roughly 6 or 7 months and I liked Tumbleweed so much that I put it on my laptop.
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2005, got curious and bought a magazine with a SUSE 10 CD. It was the only distro I tried that correctly recognized the modem card in my PC. Stayed on it because of KDE and Yast.
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I actually switched this year. I liked Ubuntu LTS for a long while, but suddenly I realized that I didn’t like the direction Ubuntu was heading. With more and more packages replaced with snaps, it would be increasingly harder to use it long-term.
However, there were no other adequate alternatives. Debian felt way too old, and their wiki advised against using Testing, since it gets less security patches compared to Sid AND Stable.
Linux Mint was filled to the brim with Python applications written by the crew, some of which were running in the background at all times.
Fedora wasn’t really stable, in a sense that its release cycle was the same type of deal as non-LTS Ubuntu, and that didn’t cut it. Recent actions of Redhat didn’t help it either.
Seeing that there wasn’t really any other option, I looked over to Leap. After several months of using it, I can say that it’s been a blast. I’ve tried Tumbleweed in the meantime, but it just isn’t quite my thing. With Leap, I have a solid base without having to worry about constant updates. Kudos to everyone involved, you are doing an excellent job!
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SUSE Gekko is CUTE. that’s it, only one reason.
indeed, KDE is great, so many things you can do.
https://paste.opensuse.org/pastes/bfab678bf43e
Even earlier, -It was before SUSE 10.1 (2006). I’m from Novell Netware. Still works fine to me. We will see what the future path will lead us.
Leap15.5
Pi-hole
From Win education ->Win enterprise (including Azure) and still using as a main OS.
Regards
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I started working at Telenokia (later Nokia) as a test engineer in 1983. Of course, the telephone network had to use a real-time operating system, which was Nokia’s own product. I thought it made sense and I also liked the VAX/VMS that the software was coded on.
Then disaster struck, Nokia introduced Windows for Workgroups. It was so slow and full of bugs that I hated it from the start.
I had to find something better than Windows at home, and I installed the desktop from the components. I installed SOT Best Linux (1998?) on it. After that I tried different linux distros and finally found the one I wanted.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the first Suse distro, but I remember it being SuSE Linux 7 or 8.
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After administrating some HP-UX workstations at work in the late 80’s I guess I always missed some Unix/Linux based OS. Used windows for decades, but as MS seems they more and more want to take ownership of your life, I got tired of it and decided to give Linux a real chance a couple of years ago.
Due to a glitchy and unstable hardware in a mini pc, now returned, I tested several distros as I thought that would solve the problem. On my new self-build amd based PC the plan was to use Mint, but due to an old kernel for the latest AMD 5 series mb, I got very bad graphic performance. In the searching for a more updated distro, I came across OpenSuse TW and couldn’t be more happy.
I have now thrown Windows and all other MS applications out my house, uses TW with KDE on all my three PC’s which is my main PC in the living room, my Dell laptop for the garage for maintenance of my MC, and my third PC connected to the TV for streaming etc.
I would be more than happy to donate a small amount to OpenSuse now and then if that would be possible, but seems not. That was done in a good way at the Mint site.
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And plus Leap 16 is coming next year!
What an interesting thread 
. It was great reading through everyone’s responses as to how they came upon OpenSuse and its different flavors, Leap and Tumbleweed, though so far I haven’t seen anyone mentioning MicroOS. 
As for myself, I have been working with Linux on servers (Debian exclusively) for over a decade now but I’m quite new to using Linux on the desktop, though I was running Debian, EndeavourOS, and a few other distros on my secondary laptop since 2018.
All that time I was using Windows 10 on my primary machine, Win 11 wasn’t supported on my hardware and I didn’t quite like using it on other people’s machines. About 2 years ago I started experiencing some H/W issues and realized the home directory backup which I had on Windows was insufficient. I wanted something more robust and offering full system backup and restoration without taking the system offline.
Around 2021/22 I made the switch to Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) when moving to a new primary machine. Unfortunately some H/W issues followed me here too due to incompatible memory modules. Luckily I had replicated (what we have in OpenSuse) to some extent a fairly robust if manual backup and restoration on LMDE using btrfs/snapper/grub-btrfs.
Fast forward to the end of 2023, LMDE team was moving to their new desktop environment (DE) Cinnamon 6 and I experienced some small bugs which took about a week or two to be resolved and still there were some minor issues with extensions and such (all to be expected when a major DE drops) but I was unsatisfied and started looking at moving to a stable Debian base.
The problem was that I had spent quite a lot of time modifying the LMDE installer / live ISO to suit my requirements (LUKS + LVM + root on btrfs) and I hated having to redo all that with Debian and its Calamares live installer.
At this point it was pretty clear I was going to great lengths just to replicate a 
version of the features (btrfs+snapper+grub integration) OpenSuse was providing by default. So I just moved to Gnome on OpenSuse (wanted a change of workflow, did not want to replicate the traditional wiper motion with the mouse), read many positive things about Tumbleweed on the interwebs and decided to take the plunge. The water is cold and shocking and swift but I’ve learned somewhat to swim with the current, at least enough not to drown 
I’ll start with the good:
- Yast Installer’s partitioning (both guided and expert) is fantastic, it’s the best I’ve ever come across on any installer yet, and I’ve tried a few (Debian’s old one, Fedora’s Anaconda, Calamares everywhere, Ubuntu’s new one, Mint, archinstall)
- Yast for configuring less often used and rather complicated steps like configuring VMs, kdump/kexec, etc.
- Documentation: again wonderful, it’s not Arch or Gentoo but covers almost everything you’d want to do using Yast and the terminal both. Unlike the Arch wiki, it’s in a book-like readable fashion (similar to Debian but better IMHO) which I personally prefer.
- There’s something for everyone with Leap, Tumbleweed / Slowroll, and MicroOS / Aeon.
- The forums ofc. People are so willing to help out here even with really complicated and non-standard issues.
- Most everything, at least on the surface works. There are no major issues OOTB.
- Zypper and OPI are both amazing.
- Lots of tooling like
transactional-updatethat leverages btrfs and snapshots in ways I’d never knew possible, among others.
The bad:
- No wifi in Yast Installer, it detects my wireless device/driver so probably rfkill is enabled. I don’t know
Because of Tumbleweed’s rolling nature, I always ended up having to “install” the whole thing twice without network/updates during the installation - The codecs situation as many others have said, it’s quite bad as a new user. You have to go searching for it and read the docs and you find
opito do it for you or do it manually! - Zypper is slow to download/install packages in its default config, though positive changes like async support for downloading are officially on the way and external tools do exist that have done this some time.
- Rolling release means lots of updates and consequently lots of new problems every day for you to figure out. The forums are a huge help. I’ve experienced nightly updates failing due to mirrors being not fully synchronized to features like
kexecwhich I use regularly breaking because there was an upstream bug, which you would only know when you’ve created a Bugzilla report and then requires you to follow up with upstream if you can. I severely underestimated the man hours I would end up spending on my personal pet machines when moving to a rolling release distro apparently. - External packages are often an afterthought for OpenSuse, even if an RPM for Fedora exists it may not work on OpenSuse due to different dependency names, that’s if there’s an RPM at all.
The ugly:
- Lots of bugs underneath the surface once you start poking around:
libgdais broken, apparently an upstream issue though the same version on Fedora works fine. Without it, Gnome extensions can’t even access their own SQLite database.kexecbroken due to an upstream bug introduced in 6.7.x series, but the same buggy kernels are pushed out to Slowroll andkernel-longtermusers. Don’t know about Leap!transactional-updateboots into the old kernel when using kexec- Showstopper bug with btrfs quota/qgroup that caused the entire filesystem to self-destruct, requiring everything to be restored from backups to a new install.
- This is a repeat, but the total man hours spent troubleshooting all the bugs, following up with Bugzilla, getting redirected to upstream, following up with them. All the aforementioned bugs are still active after a few weeks and the only one with any sort of hopeful resolution on the horizon is the kernel regression, but that too requires a lot of time patching and building new kernels as the issue is not easily reproducible.
Maybe I will switch to Leap some day if it exists 
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This is a good thread to keep open. The way to keep it open is with an occasional comment. As for me, I will add my story in a day or two, running out of openSUSE timeslot today.
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I started using openSUSE as my daily driver in 2012 after some time on Fedora with Gnome. I didn’t like Gnome anymore and discovered that KDE Plasma is a great DE and that it looked very nice in openSUSE. It just felt right. And, yes, Yast needs to me mentioned, too. it makes many things a lot easier for someone who is not an expert.
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I finally switched to Linux in 2004 after too much thinking and hesitating. Tested debian first and then another obscure distro but wasn’t very convinced (but I did not understood much of Linux then TBH). Then a colleague recommended SUSE, tested (perhaps 9.0?) and I liked it very much: polished and stable. YaST made a difference for the better of course. I then just stayed here: first a couple of more SUSE versions, then openSUSE, then Leap and then Tumbleweed. I use TW ever since about 6 yrs ago in my two machines, for work and recreation. Kudos to the devs and everyone who works hard to get this wonderful distro working so smoothly!
EDIT: I first used GNOME, then KDE for some years until it got resource hungry in my old CPUs, then about 2010 or so I “discovered” XFCE and stayed there ever since.
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Hi, I started a long time ago with Suse 6.x and Red Hat. I always liked Yast. After many years with only Windows about 11 months ago I returned to openSUSE. I’ve tried different Linux OS but my mainstay is always openSUSE.
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You missed something in the (apparently confusing) discussion about the “closing of dormant threads”. It will only be done to the “technical help” forums and thus NOT to Open Chat.
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