One more point that you shouldn’t let scare you away, but just something nice to know going into OpenSUSE: by default, the distro is FOSS only, the official software repositories don’t have things like proprietary multimedia codecs or other non-free (as in free speech) software included. You have to enable these yourself if you want them (to, say, watch MP4 files perhaps).

This has gotten so dead simple recently that it can be done in a couple of terminal commands, it’s just important to mention. If you know it going in, it saves the step of “what the heck, why aren’t my media files playing??”

sudo zypper install opi

opi codecs

OPI is a package manager for installing software from a few sources, namely the openSUSE Build Service (which is where OPI gets its name, OBS Package Iinstaller), Microsoft, the Packman repositories, and a few others. Installing codecs is the only thing I have ever used it for, though.

EDIT: zipper to zypper

Thank you!

I’m just starting to spread my wings outside of Ubuntu right and see what’s out there.

As you must have been aware of by now; there are hundreds of distros out there. Which obviously makes it a daunting task to find your distro with that overwhelming amount of distros to potentially choose from. However, quite fortunately, the vast majority is actually not even worth considering as a daily driver. Arguably only the popular independent distros (Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu^[1] etc^[2]) are noteworthy, unless you’ve got very specific wants and/or needs that are only easily accessible through a derivative of theirs. Out of these, Gentoo is perhaps too much of a deep dive at this point in your Linux journey. Slackware ain’t bad, but as you’ve already had some experience with modern Linux distros, I find it rather unlikely that you would enjoy using it; though, perhaps, you might one day (read: decades down the line). So…, only five distros remain… On that note, for whatever it’s worth, openSUSE Tumbleweed definitely stands out positively among these IMO (though perhaps another one might be shining even brighter (obviously biased 😜)).

The UI looks real neat as well.

Interesting. Are you referring to the desktop environment? Which -actually- should be reproducible on most other distros*. Or perhaps you’re actually referring to YaST? Which is openSUSE’s excellent configuration tool; perhaps closest thing that Linux has to Windows’ Control Panel. Some even regard it as openSUSE’s killer-feature, especially because most other distros (aside from MX Linux) only come with relatively basic configuration tools by comparison. In retrospect, I probably should have mentioned it in my earlier comment 😅.

I’m not really looking for a gaming focused distro right now.

I’m actually glad you aren’t; they generally tend to miss out on polish. If you do end up looking into one, then I’d argue it’s better to run a dedicated distro as such -perhaps as a dual boot- for all your gaming needs instead of trying to game heavily on your daily driver, unless you find that too cumbersome and/or fear for issues related to storage. I’m aware that this is probably an unpopular take*.

Just something that I can daily drive and occasionally play games with.

Aight, got ya. Well, in that case, openSUSE Tumbleweed is definitely worth considering.

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1. I am very aware that Ubuntu is technically not quite as independent as the others are.
2. I felt the likes of Alpine, Guix, NixOS, Puppy, Solus and Void are at least worth mentioning as independent distros.