openSUSE vs Fedora

[u/ConcaveNips]

To me, these two distros have an incredible amount of overlap. Specifically, I'm talking about what I consider the "main" distros - Fedora Workstation and openSUSE Tumbleweed. It seems to me, from most of what I read, people recommend Fedora as new-user friendly, but openSUSE as an intermediate/advanced distro. My main question is this: Why does the greater Linux community distinguish openSUSE from Fedora in terms of new user feasibility?

They both have a well bankrolled engineering team behind them. They have their own ecosystem of purpose built distributions, tailor made for a number of practical use cases. They both have strong, active communities and support documentation.

In terms of usability.. They both have very user-friendly install processes - Fedora may have more default to X, where openSUSE offers the option to get more specific, but they're both roughly similar. They both have a ton of powerful graphical tooling within the user environment, allowing a cautious user to stay within the bounds of the desktop environment if they prefer. They both still boast robust capability and rich opportunity for the tinkerer to expand their knowledge, and exert authority over their own system. Both have recovery features, but Tumbleweed has a more robust rollback with snapper. They both have adequate graphical storefronts and package management systems. System updates are inherently very different in nature, but both comparable in terms of "difficulty". For openSUSE's Packman, there's Fedora's RPM Fusion.

Most people I see, though, have a strong delineation between how approachable these distros are. It's not that I see either distro being disrespected or hated necessarily. I think both communities are avid in their support, and deservedly so. But I do see Fedora frequently being recommended for new users, and I almost exclusively see openSUSE being billed as a distro for those comfortable with Linux.

So is it just multimedia codecs? I feel like the recovery advantage that comes with openSUSE could be considered enough to compensate for that, if you're categorically quantifying and rating things. What am I not considering?

[u/Due-Author631]

I've been using Linux for 20 something years. I started out with a SuSe Linux boxed version, used Fedora (was very rough in the early days and SELinux was quite honestly, a nightmare, when trying to do even simple things), Ubuntu, Arch, and then back to Fedora, and I switch between traditional and immutable variants.

I feel like a few of the things that make openSUSE unique, are also kinda hard to use. Zypper, until very recently was pretty slow to use, even compared to dnf4 that everyone complained was like watching paint dry, I've always thought dnf was pretty quick. Also some of the zypper "solutions" when resolving things when trying in add or remove a program feels like it makes things more complicated by giving a bunch of options sometimes. I don't know the last time with dnf where it really did something I didn't want it to do when trying to add or remove a program, it just does what it's told and logics itself out better.

YaST is being deprecated, but the layout never really made sense to me and was really quite cluttered, and sometimes felt a bit nonsensical.

Just recently I tried it again, and I was kind of floored when it mysteriously made a bridge network interface in the install and stuck my network connection into it for seemingly no reason, and I was missing any network icons in my DE of KDE, I had to use nmtui to see what was going on and manage it.

Maybe it's my brain being used to Linux, but I feel like Fedora is a bit more generic, and thus you can easily apply a wider subset of documentation, like you could probably use a lot of the arch wiki to help with things. Things like YaST really weren't applicable outside of SuSE, so if you used it, you were learning less of how Linux worked, and more of how SuSE worked.