Okay, ill finally cure my curiosity and ask!

I've never used SUSE before, however from what i read on other forums and some members on this forum, many seem to find it bloated and slow. But i've been noticing alot of 'power-users' using SUSE lately.... A few moderators on this forum as well as others use SUSE as their main distribution. I was wondering if any of you who are competent in Linux use, would be able to tell me why you use SUSE? Distrowatch even says it is designed for very beginner users, and yet, my University lectures' use it.

I'm obviously missing something, and i've tried looking for a similar question for a while but havnt found anything great. A 'busy poweruser' is the best i've come across. But i'd love to hear about peoples experience with the distribution.

I'm by no means paying out on the distribution i am just curious

Thanks for the time for reading this post. Hope everyone's well.
And thanks for your answers/remarks.

My work uses it (as well as RHEL) because our customers do. As a sysadmin, I've found it no different than RHEL in terms of stability, speed, and ease of use.

1 members found this post helpful.

openSUSE, or SLES/SLED?

You can produce a system with lots of stuff installed on anything with extensive repositories; you don't have to, though. There are lots of setup options and you have to know something about what you are doing to get exactly what you want.

I think openSUSE has quite a lot of range; it can be used by a relative newbie, but it doesn't smother you in '...Uncle Distro knows best, so don't ask...', while managing to automate what can be automated, so you can just get on and do stuff. On the other hand, the repos, when you include all the stuff available, are rather extensive, and it is something fairly obscure that isn't available somewhere as an oS package. You can produce a rolling release variant, a home appliance, a minimal server, or just a normal desktop with relatively simple tweaks.

It also does a decent job with KDE, and my preference is for KDE over Gnome (there are other desktops that I think are quite acceptable, but, for me, KDE vs Gnome is quite clear and there aren't all that many good KDE-centric distros out there - there are probably three or four others that I'd consider). And you get a choice of KDEs...the 'bleeding edge' one, the 'fixed one that came at the time of release', the 'straight' upstream one.

And, of course, it isn't a one-UI distro. I quite like the idea of Bodhi, but if I ever went off Enlightenment, which could happen, that would be unfortunate.

So, for me, it isn't any particular thing that is 'super'; it just doesn't do a really bad job on anything, and most other distros have some weak point or another.

You do have to get used to the idea of Yast, though; one overarching tool for sysadmin. Some people find this just too clumsy, but if you can't get used to Yast, then oS probably isn't going to be something you'll ever really like.

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I'm running SuSE in an enterprise environment, because when you're talking about enterprise and Linux, there are really only two choices: SLES, and RHEL. We selected SLES because that's what our hardware vendor recommended, and since that vendor built Watson on this same hardware running SLES, I guess they're practicing what they preach.

Since I started supporting it, I've become a convert. The only significant difference between the two is Yast, and you always have the option to use Yast or not. In most of the situations where I use Yast, it's because it automated a bunch of common tasks in a sensible way that should have been done years ago. There's no sense in having a 12-step checklist to configure a server on the network or add a user account. We're in the business of automation, not the business of running down checklists for everyday tasks.

If Novell hadn't automated those, I would have had to do it myself. But since these are things everybody does regardless of their environment, it makes the most sense that the tools should come with the system.

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A power user will not use a system, because it was recommended (or not recommended) by others, he uses the system that fits his needs the most. That may be Suse or any other distro, but most likely it will be a distro that is good customizable, and Suse is such a distro.
Also keep in mind that Suse is a very old distro, so some people may use it because they are used to it for a long time.

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Hey guys,

Thanks everyone for contributing and taking the time, it cleared alot of things up.

Hope everyones well,
cheers.

Some time/years ago I was sure that user-friendly distributions are for beginners.
Now, after some years of Linux experience, I notice that using a friendly distribution doesn't mean to be a beginner. :-)
Linus Torvalds uses Ubuntu, as far as I remember.

I use Ubuntu at work because it's used by our employees and I provide the tech. support for them. That's why I also have Ubuntu on my PC. And it't really friendly, though "common users" sometimes don't like it because it's not like Windows and some devices may work not so well/easy as in Win (but I do my best). :-)

At home I have Debian for about 8 months, but it's my first experience with it. Before I was a Zenwalk user for a long time.