Surprised this hasn't been posted earlier: OpenSUSE, German Linux distribution

I just installed OpenSUSE on both my work and personal machines, having been on Kubuntu for many years prior to that. I love it so far!

Be aware that Suse, the parent company that donated the basis for opensuse to exist has asked them to change the branding and name for something that doesn't include Suse. So, keep your eyes peeled for that in the mid future.

Yeah ill be switching off of Fedora onto OpenSUSE as ive heard good things and Fedora is headed by Redhat, which is headed by IBM. I liked Fedora but its not anythung im super attached to so looking forward to learning OpenSUSE.

Why not go 100 percent corporation free? https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
- These distros reject everything that is not free as in free speech. This means no binary drivers, no binary firmware, no binary software. While this is very idealistic, not in a bad way, it might be impractical for most people. Start with an "easy" Linux, you can always go the hardcore way afterwards.
  
  Especially people who play any kind of semi-modern game. The open source nvidia drivers are just not there when it comes to performance.

currently daily-driving their Aeon flavour. it may be the best Linux-for-beginners i've ever seen. the installer has no options at all and just overwrites the disk with a preloaded partition which means installation takes literally five minutes. it's auto-updating, immutable, snapshots itself so it can roll back when something breaks, and basically only allows Flatpaks. on first boot yoy get an empty desktop with browser, app store, notes app, and calculator, and those are literally the only user applications on the machine. very refreshing.
- That sounds really cool! Do you know if they include GPU drivers (NVDIA) or how you'd install them?

Been using it for a few months now and it's great. I haven't had any major problems with it. YAST is an awesome tool so I rarely had to use console commands to change/fix stuff. And filesystem snapshots are very well integrated so that one time I did fuck up and the system wouldn't boot (it was entirely my fault) it was very easy to roll back changes.

A: I will always support SUSE, even if I don't use it myself.
B: Any Linux can be considered an international effort.
C: If you want to avoid American evil corp distros, skip RedHat (IBM) and Oracle. Maybe avoid Ubuntu and Pop!_OS too, but they are not in the same Evil Cyberpunk Megacorp level as IBM and Oracle.

IMHO any Linux distribution will be a good change from Windows and Mac if you are trying to divest from US products.
Even if they are not european, they are open source.
- The Linux Foundation might be based in California, but I still very much consider it to be Finnish. And Torvalds is, thankfully, very much on the anti-fascist side of the spectrum.
  
  Luckily the Linux Foundation stuff (having to obey US sanctions on Russian companies) affected those specific devs and not really users or anyone else.

SuSE was a blessing for me in the 1990s when you couldn't just download huge amount of data over the Internet. But I could walk into my local computer store and buy a 8 CD package with two big handbooks for 70 Deutschmarks.
Long story short: Without SuSE I might not be a software developer today, so I'm thankful even though I prefer other distros today. 🦎

I love opensuse if nothing else for the great mascot and the very talented artists who do their wallpapers, logos, and splashes. Also their open source font is what I daily drive on my machines! It is very nice!
Sadly they have a small team I think compared to other major distros. Their microOS team I think is just 2 or 3 people.
I have both Kalpa and bazzite and for me, bazzite just works better in almost every case and their encryption scheme and rollback method fits my needs better. But Kalpa is very usable if you don't game. Otherwise some hours of work getting steam flatpak working correctly.

I'm a long-time OpenSuSE user, so I heartily recommend this! It leans more towards the professional side, so probably not for beginners, IMHO.

Having worked on UnitedLinux, I'm okay if I'm never touch SuSE again. There are so many other options out there, still, that I can have the better distro format and still avoid SuSE. Yay!