I moved from Ubuntu to OpenSUSE tumbleweed recently and I must say it is lovely. The OS is still the Linux I learned when running slackware (with some modern extras that I have learned to live with) while still giving me most of the polish of Ubuntu.
Some things were of course strange. Having to type the disk encryption password twice being standard behaviour is pretty strange, and not getting to set the keyboard layout properly on install is always a bummer (I use Swedish Dvorak). Ubuntu is the only distro so far that gets this right in the installer.
I believe that the disk encryption twice thing is to prevent the so called "evil maid" attack. Where both the boot partition, and the file system are separately encrypted. Frustratingly, the encryption in GRUB2 is painfully slow, so I normally disable that. You can do this by creating the boot partition separately from the root file system, and only encryption the OS filesystem. The downside is that if someone steals your drive, or clones it, they can hammer away at the encrypted filesystem. Not really in my threat model, so I normally go with unencrypted boot + encrypted filesystem. The kernel decryption is much faster as well.
I did install OpenSUSE and immediately removed it after I encountered the same problem.
It's not normal to have to enter the exact same password twice. I don't care if it's about the "evil maid" attack or whatever.
Linux developers would have us open our fridges by first flipping them upside down and explain with a straight face it's perfectly normal and is meant to address <this or that issue>.
It's possbile to setup a keyfile in your boot partition to decrypt your root partition so you only have to enter a password once. But this really shouldn't be necessary.
I switched to OpenSUSE after an year with Fedora and ~14 years on Ubuntu. The installer had me scratching my head. After my first attempt I too ended up having to enter the decryption key twice. The installer definitely could do with polish. Ubuntu's installer still remains the gold standard in terms of ease of use.
After reinstallation with the correct configuration though, it was smooth sailing. The only other change I had to make was disabling KWallet so that it connects to WiFi without prompting me for a decryption key.
Personally I find Fedora's installer to be less intuitive than OpenSUSE. OpenSUSE is wizard style, while Fedora is just a page with all the options where click on the stuff you care about changing, some of which has sensible defaults and some of which is mandatory to visit. It's probably a lot more efficient once you're used to it, but it felt unintuitive the first time I used it.
I don't remember the details but I don't think I had any trouble with Fedora's installer. But I spent way to much time trying to figure out how to modify the guided partition scheme that OpenSUSE picked.
I switched about 8 months ago, and also made the switch to KDE around the same time. I'm running it on everything I own now, apart from my phone and a Raspberry Pi. I love it. Having snapper installed and enabled by default has saved my bacon twice. Most recently I did a `zypper dup --no-recommends` and my ASUS Zenbook S OLED suddenly refused to operate at any resolution other than max (amd driver / kernel update?) so I rolled back and everything worked. That's extremely convenient, especially on a work machine where you can't afford to be wasting half a day fixing shit.
I've been using Leap extensively for personal projects, and I really like the philosophy of the distro, but it feels very different from CentOS (which I use at work).
A lot of the tooling that has been built for SLES is included in OpenSuSE (yast, snapper, etc.) and it makes a world of difference for managing servers.
I understand why they want to cater to the CentOS sysadmins looking for an alternative, but without the brand recognition of RHEL behind it, it's an uphill battle -despite being a very good distro in its own right.
We have been using openSuSE Leap on our servers for at least 12 years and are quite happy with it. Compared to CentOS, Ubuntu LTS and Debian it has a yearly release cycle and 18 month support window.
Upgrades between minor versions are quite easy to do and imply minimal risk. Since 15.3 if ones uses btrfs and something goes wrong the upgrade can also be rolled back. It has both yast (text ui) and zypper (cli) for system configuration and package installs, the config files in /etc are also quite sane, without lots of includes and convoluted hierarchy.
On the desktop we still use Unbutu LTS. I've tried to switch to Debian but had issues, I would have switched to Leap but it wasn't clear if it has Gnome desktop and how polished it is. Thmbleweed has got it, but since we use it for work we don't want our dev environment breaking.
I'm using Tumbleweed at work. In 8 months of weekly `zypper dup` I've encountered 2 issues, one minor and one major. In both cases I did a smaller rollback and it instantly fixed the issue. Generally if you wait a week and retry, the upgrade works because the but has been fixed.
Still not sure whether I want to move to Tumbleweed or Gentoo. I have reservations that Gentoo might be less stable but on the other hand you don't have to `emerge --deep @world` every day.
Arch Linux is your friend. You will find all the packages in AUR and answers you seek in documentation or with extremely active community.
Not as ‘deep’ as gentoo and not as script kiddy as tumbleweed. I use Leap for servers and installed gentoo to learn things initially. Love all the distributions named here!
They exist as collection of scripts to install precompiled (or to be compiled) packages, maintained by 3rd party developers as means of convenience, they’re not to be blindly installed as system packages (which I agree is what often people would do)
It offers certain autonomy to users on top of stable system to build/preinstall packages when they deem it necessary.
It’s always advised to check what’s happening with AUR scripts & updates, in archwiki with well noted warnings.
These things don’t sit well with script kiddie style of doing things!
It also makes it easy to write and share your own packages when you need something that's not in the repos (or the AUR). The first package will take you about an hour of reading documentation (which is 10+ times less than it took to build my first Debian package), but the next ones will not take more than 5-10 minutes.
Some things were of course strange. Having to type the disk encryption password twice being standard behaviour is pretty strange, and not getting to set the keyboard layout properly on install is always a bummer (I use Swedish Dvorak). Ubuntu is the only distro so far that gets this right in the installer.
It was an easy fix in SUSE though.