I'm not sure how many other Linux users there are on here, but I've used openSUSE Leap (their regular release, i.e. not rolling) for a long time. I was reading up this morning on openSUSE Leap 16.0, which was released in October. They've disabled AppArmor and are using SELinux instead. SELinux is no doubt the more powerful technology, but it can break things. You need an expert in SELinux or you might as well disable it, which is what I inevitably do. How protected am I with SELinux if it's disabled? In 15 years of daily use of AppArmor, I've never seen it break anything.

They're also doing away with YaST (short for Yet another Setup Tool). It's an incredibly complete set of administrative tools, which was probably the one thing that most set openSUSE apart from other distributions. I first used SuSE Linux in late 1996, and it already had YaST. I CAN'T BELIEVE they're not going to continue to work on it. For now it's disabled by default but still available. Word is it will be removed down the line.

I switched my primary desktop OS to openSUSE in 2010 when Mandriva Linux disappeared. I love the distro. I've bought merchandise to support it. I have a picture of my four year old son in an openSUSE hoodie at a Paul McCartney concert in Houston in 2012. I have a picture of me taken in 2018 in Birmingham, England, and I'm in an openSUSE shirt. If not for my tennis shoes, no one would have known I was an American.

I will likely switch to Debian stable, which is a rock solid distro, but I'm honestly upset at what they've done with my favorite distro. openSUSE Leap 15.6 is supported until late April, so I have some time to think about it. I will build an openSUSE 16.0 VM this afternoon and try to give it a chance, but without YaST, I don't really see the point of it. It seems like a German Rocky Linux to me.

I'm pretty sure that these changes have already worked their way into SuSE's rolling releases and that Leap is that last of their releases to see them.

My experience with SELinux has been that it's always disabled because it's a complete PITA. It's even disruptive in "permissive" mode.

We have used SuSE commercially many times and have been happy with their support. That said, they have also cancelled support quick for products we were licensed for like Ceph.

Overall, I'd take SuSE over Red Hat, even before IBM took them over.

All that said, if we don't have a specific vendor requirement for RHEL, we have now switched our goto OS to Ubuntu LTS, away from RHEL/CentOS/Rocky.

I have used SuSE Linux and openSuSE since the 1990s. I've run both tumbleweed and leap. Currently, I'm running Leap 16. I was also unhappy to see YaST gone.

There are some software packages that are, as far as I can tell, no longer available on openSuSE Leap 16. One, for example, is LibreCAD.

I also have a couple of virtual machines on my workstation. One runs Fedora Silverblue using Gnome-boxes and the other runs OpenBSD on QEMU/KVM. I also had Debian in Gnome-boxes for a while, but I deleted it with intentions of reinstalling it to fix a problem. This allows me to run several things that are not available on Leap 16.

My laptop runs Fedora Silverblue.

For what it's worth, I'm thinking of switching to FreeBSD on my workstation, but not because of openSuSE. There are some Linux programs that I like to run, but with virtual machines, I can set up a virtual machine to run Linux for the programs to run and don't need them to run on the primary OS any more.

My required apps and my desired apps include:
LibreCAD
LibreWolf
ProtonAuthenticator
ProtonVPN
Vivaldi (web browser)

My servers are all OpenBSD.

I saw an interesting quote recently that goes something like this: BSD was created by people who love Unix; Linux was created by people who hate Windows.

By the way, Myrlyn on Leap 16 looks a lot like YaST for installing software.

A retired friend of mine who is about 80 was having trouble with Windows on his laptop and so I installed Fedora Silverblue on it for him. He loves it.

He has a brand new Dell desktop still in the box and he asked me last week if I can install Silverblue on it, too.

For an article about switching from Linux to FreeBSD, see https://www.zdnet.com/article/freebsd-will-challenge-your-skills-and-make-you-learn-along-the-way

I ran FreeBSD years ago for several years beginning in the 1990's and then switched to Linux. Then OpenBSD for a couple of years and then Linux again. On servers, I've run OpenBSD the entire time.

On Linux, I've used mostly SuSE LInux and then openSuSE, but have also used Red Hat, Fedora, Silverblue, Ubuntu, and Debian for short periods of time.

I also tried Solaris for a while and have considered trying Plan 9.

I have been using Ubuntu LTS for a long time and just upgrade every other year, but I have always preferred Debian style and apt package manager.

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My servers are all OpenBSD.

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Why did you choose that over FreeBSD? Security?

I currently have a Ubuntu server box and have another, more recent vintage box I want to install a virtuallizer so I can run multiple things on it. Thinking of turning the old box into a custom router using OpenBSD.

I wound up installing Debian 13 (stable). It's rock solid if not exciting. I think I'd really like to use MX Linux. I've been playing around with it on a VM.

Dealing with my Windows VMs has been a PITA. I exported my two Windows VMs to a thumb drive and then imported them to my new Debian host. One of the two Win VMs was no longer activated, and I had to buy a new license for it (luckily it was $11.97). I also had to buy a new MS Office license for that machine. These are Oracle VirtualBox VMs.

As I said, I'd like to install MX Linux 25, but I don't know how to do it without wrecking my Microsoft licensing on the VMs.