openSUSE is one of the old desktop oriented distros. I find it somehow similar to the old glorious Mandrake (r.i.p.). Like it it's a European distro and both of them are relatively KDE centric and so also somehow similar to Windows. So the philosophy behind both of them is to be user friendly in the way you can do relatively much with the central configuration panel.
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What do you mean by "a European distro"?
Both have their origin in Europe. openSUSE has its origins in Germany, that's why it is still very popular there. Mandrake had its roots im France.
I'm more curious of the implications. Is KDE considered more popular in Europe?
I always had the impression that OpenSuse and especially KDE is most popular in Germany.
Why? Because it works and is reliable. I've been using Opensuse now for ten years on a server and it updated through all the releases over the years without problems. The machine is getting retired now, though. But the replacement will get Leap again for sure.
My Leap hasn't been running for so long but knowing it will be supported for a long time and just having one yast command to make weekly automatic patches is just a nice feeling. The only problem I had is that python 3.7 is the default which makes some applications harder to run since I have to define python 3.11(also installed) manually but it's really not that big of a problem.
It's just what you're used to. To me fedora seems weird and I don't know why people choose it over opensuse. To me opensuse feels like home.
Also yast is great and I don't get why more distros don't have a similar thing.
Most modern distros are either new distro trying to have more modern sensibilities, distros based off of Debian, Arch, or Fedora, or occasionally original things that are okay with being superficially similar to one of those while doing things differently at lower levels. OpenSUSE is one of the few remaining distros from the olden days that has been independent and doing their own thing for decades without spawning a bunch of forks or dying off. If you want to try something even older and crazier Slackware is sure an experience.
you may not know this, but suse was originally based off of slackware way, way, waaaaay back in the day before changing over to a jurix base.
I must admit I've mostly been an Ubuntu user since about 2007. But switching to Tumbleweed was like a breath of fresh air. A lot of the things were different, but accumulated experience over years allowed me to feel at home. I used YaST once or twice, you don't need it at all.
You could read the docs.