Decided to try out Linux, what now? Tips, tricks, guides for 2017?

First lets start with difficulty, Arch isn't difficult but I don't think it will suit you, it can break and you don't want that.
I think you picked a good choice with OpenSUSE, its backed by SUSE, they are doing extremely well and have great characters like Bryan Lunduke in the community.
I would use OpenSUSE Leap due to stability, also it relies on BTRFS, link this with snapper and you have the ability to rapidly revert from any issues.
YaST is also a brilliant tool, allows you to easily configure things.

Check out the OpenSUSE one click installer, its rather cool for a lot of things, it does require Firefox to work though.

Stick with OpenSUSE Leap, its a great offering, seems to have everything you want and is stable which is what you need for work, plus its more up to date that things like CentOS/RHEL.

I had half my steam games breaking randomly with OpenSUSE. Also some games wouldn't load under the DRI3 driver, but with Maui, it all just suddenly works right off the bat. Everything is setup the same except I'm using Mesa-git 17.2, because why not? its just a matter of subscribing to a PPA, done, no compiling or special custom patches needed...

If you have no interest in gaming then OpenSUSE seems pretty good to me.

PS. I did a SHIT LOAD of library trouble shooting with ARCH and OpenSUSE btw, one day I would fix it all, YAY. Wake up in morning and it was all broken again(in different ways, I went deep).... That is what you must accept with those distros.