Why I switched from Fedora to openSUSE
Up until now I had a Fedora 11 KDE setup but just a few days back I installed openSUSE. There were a few reasons behind it and ultimately when you hop from one distribution to another your reasons for switching will vary - you might like the packaging system or the distribution's implementation of your favourite desktop environment or something else.
If you're the kind who likes to build your setup using a base, then I'd recommend you try Arch Linux. I've enjoyed Arch but after a while I moved on to Fedora. Fedora was my first Linux distro back when it was Fedora Core 3 and I hadn't tried it since then. Fedora 10 was a solid release and so is Fedora 11 now.
openSUSE Build Service
After playing with Fedora 11 from its Beta release, I managed to setup a stable system running KDE 4.2.3. I even taught myself some basic RPM packaging and built RPMs for Bespin, QtCurve and Skultpture. There were no official RPMs for Bespin and Skulpture at the time and I planned on submitting them via Red Hat's Bugzilla for approval. Around that time I started looking for more RPM packaging resources when I stumbled on to some information on the openSUSE Build Service. The OBS allows you to build packages for multiple distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva to name a few. I've setup an account and I intend to read openSUSE's documentation in detail to understand how packages are built with OBS.
Multiple Updated Additional Repositories
With Fedora I stuck to the default repositories to keep it safe and stuck with the official KDE packages. openSUSE I feel, is geared more towards the enthusiast. Again, thanks to the openSUSE Build Service, I can access the latest versions of Firefox, Wine, OpenOffice and KDE 4 through individual repositories maintained by the openSUSE Community. The openSUSE 11.1 release defaults to KDE 4.1.x but there is an unofficial but stable repository for KDE 4.2 which I am currently using. I intend to update to the KDE 4 Factory repository to move to KDE 4.3, even though it is currently in the Beta stage. There is also a Games repository which gets updated regularly and that's always useful. Sometimes you want the latest version of Nexuiz but you're stuck with what's in your distribution's repositories.
Single System Control Panel - YaST
I've used openSUSE 10.3 in the past and I found YaST at the time a little slow in terms of Software Management. This has improved and I'm satisfied with the speed and functioning right now. YaST is more then just a package manager, its the single system control panel you could ask for. Everything from Network Devices to setting up your Bootloader is included here. The 11.2 Milestone Release has some improvements in YaST's Software Management in KDE which is something I'm looking forward to.
Eight Month Release Cycle
openSUSE announced the Roadmap to 11.2 and the release cycle for subsequent openSUSE releases in March. The release plan meant that instead of waiting for six months for the next release, we'd have to wait for eight months. In my opinion this was a very good move and it was probably a bit of a relief for the development team to be able to space things out a bit more. Overall, it should ensure a better final release with the latest, stable software. In the short-term, I'd say this is good for users to wait a bit longer before adopting Ext4 as well. I've had a stable experience with Arch and I am aware that some critical bugs have been fixed, but nevertheless its still a good thing.
Desktop Environment Implementation
This hasn't been a major deciding factor but it's something I like to keep in mind while recommending a Linux distribution to others - a good implementation of the desktop environment for users. I personally like the GNOME implentation of openSUSE as well with the SLAB menu and some of the application choices like Banshee for the default music player. Of course, you always have the freedom to choose the software you'd like to install but for its default package set it isn't too shabby. openSUSE uses the Go-oo version of OpenOffice which includes some fixes and enhancements which may not be present in the vanilla version. It is also reported to be noticeably faster than the vanilla version. The 1-Click Installers for some software and codecs is also pretty handy to setup a system quickly. It wouldn't be right to not mention what a fine job the openSUSE team consistently do with their final KDE releases. There are backports and the polish applied to the final product is exquisite.
These are the main reasons why I made the switch to openSUSE even though I don't doubt that Fedora is a fine Linux distribution with a great community. For a distribution that releases every six months, they manage to maintain the right balance between bleeding edge software and stability. Their feature list is exhaustive as well and they're usually ahead of Ubuntu in terms of implementing features. But its openSUSE for my taste and I think I'll stick to it.
