OpenSUSE was actually released long before Arch even existed. I'm an Arch user, btw, but I consider both operating systems to be excellent choices. Everyone has their own preferences. Let people enjoy what they like and embrace their individuality. We don't all have to be alike....
OpenSUSE was actually released long before Arch even existed.
You're basically right but just some historic facts added :
Judd Vinet started the Arch Linux project
in March 2002. OpenSUSE : Its development was opened up to the community in 2005, which marked the
creation of openSUSE. Before that it was
called SUSE Linux, first released in 1994.
I guess I'm smart enough to install opensuse, but dumb enough that I somehow got slow pacman.
I kid you not, on my hardware zypper is the fastest between ubuntu apt, fedora dnf, and arch pacman. dnf was the second-fastest on my hardware, with apt and pacman being pretty sluggish
I've also used portage which was even slower, but probably not a fair comparison considering how much more complex it is.
Serious question: What makes Arch's package manager so "great"? I always just found it confusing to use. The flags don't make any sense to me. It feels like you have to add a varying number of s or y to get it to do what you want. I never found it to be any faster or slower than any of the others (apart from portage of course) out there. And apart from the flags it doesn't seem to give me any more or less trouble than the others.
As a user it's definitely harder to get into than apt or dnf. However, as a packager, it's very easy to package new applications for pacman. That's also why the AUR offers this many packages often not found in other distros.
It's fast. That's why it's great. I've considered switching to opensuse a lot, but the speed of pacman compared to how slow zypper is always drags me back to arch
Dunno. Anecdotal, a few years ago pacman appeared to be much faster than apt-get for me. Currently I don't see that very much difference but then again I haven't paid much attention to it.
OpenSUSE exists as a testbed for SLE, I don't think there's anything confusing about that. It's also much easier to get to a sensible setup for new users. If it weren't for the AUR and the Arch Wiki, I would probably still be using it.
Arch has no reason to exist as almost all of it's benefits are replicated with nix without having your system fail to boot because you dared to update it.
I decided to dump arch when I was working in a foreign country for a month, had bad internet, and had to weigh whether -Syu or -S would be more likely to break my system. Shit's way too stressful.
Run pacman -Syu, reboot, and it fails to boot. Had it happen many times with arch and derivatives on multiple devices. It's far more likely to happen if you don't update for like a month.
Problems I had were because of software not being on the latest version, not updates. Things just work on Arch for me. Only thing that ever broke was Xorg because of Nvidia drivers but that's pretty easy fix.
Arch stable ? I mean, from experience, I've had one break in stability so bad it made me hop : the lack of gentoo-like config protect. To be fair, I was on Artix but the breakage was versions of Pipewire deleting not just my changed config files but config files it couldn't run without ! Or to be fair, also, actual Arch but on my phone, plasma 5 package conflicts (that came as is from the installation image) prevent the whole system from updating 🙃 ... Never had any of those 2 problems on OpenSUSE or, to be fair, non-Arch-based distros
Nevermind : just got my boot borked on OpenSUSE (which is dumb as the rest of the system is fine but I can't easily just reinstall just the boot) THANKS, TPMs
Edit : "what do you think is stable then ?" idk, fcking Gentoo ? "And what if I don't wanna compile blah blah" use linux lite, may not be rolling and pretty nooby but it is stable and the only one I feel comfortable handing to my mom (amongst the ones I've tried) without that much bloat