My reactions
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One of the reasons I have never considered OpenSuse is because of usability issues like having to mess with drivers every time the kernel gets updated. This is a move in the right direction. I don’t think every distro has to cater for the lowest common denominator but patches and updates that are known to break users systems with the world most common graphics card vendor is more than just an annoyance.
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Well this is what a lot of people don’t get about opensuse. Unlike fedora and Ubuntu, opensuse really doesn’t have a parent company to give directions. That means there is no guiding voice to say “hey I think we should have better driver support”.
The entire distro is community driven AND supported. Someone has to actually step up and make it happen and then dedicate themselves to actually supporting the darn thing.
The problem with a model like that is that only a handful of people have the talent necessary to make something like this happen and they are all very busy.
Novell 
actually is in charge of suse linux enterprise and steers the community of suse… due to needing patches from it every now and then
Ehhhh. You are actually wrong, but it is very very easy mistake to make.
First off, Novell does not actually do much in the way of guiding Suse. They support suse financially, and they guide the company at the administrative level but they really wouldn’t even know how to guide suse at a technical level or much else for that matter.
The most Suse does for opensuse is they appoint 1 person to be chair of the opensuse board. And 99.9999% of what this guy does is keep the peace in the opensuse community so that people don’t eat each other.
This is where people get confused. Opensuse and Suse have lots of crosstalk between various teams. So things like patches and what not are worked on by multiple people, but only out of choice.
People see the crosstalk and think this means that there is some sort of puppet and string model going on between suse and opensuse, but there really isn’t. Opensuse team members are all volunteers. They could literally flip off suse and tell them to go to hell and nothing would happen to them. For argument sake Suse representatives can not just barge in and tell opensuse to shut down leap and only support tumbleweed without legal reasons. Or vice versa.
Compare that to fedora and ubuntu where their parent companies can walk in and make sweeping changes at will (we see this with mark shuttleworth’s decision to cut unity).
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I take your point about the governance of OpenSuse, but they are not working in a vacuum. They are not the only people making a distro. Other distros manage to juggle low resources and maintain usability. There are distros with extremely small maintainer teams that handle this type of thing better. I have spent a fair bit of time with PCLinuxOS, to all intents and purposes run by a single maintainer plus a small group of volunteer testers. Usability is a high priority and they would never knowingly push an update that would break users systems. You could say much the same about Solus, very small team, basically one person. Solus is more useable than many distros with much larger teams. So the lack of resources I think is a weak argument. I feel it has much more to do with them not thinking it’s important.
It’s their project to run however they want. I would never want to impose my expectations without being willing to take on the responsibility to do the work. So as an outsider, a simple user, how a team in a project like this work, what they think is important and what’s not. Informs me about the project and influences my opinion, would I want to run their distro? OpenSuse is real interesting, I admire their work but their philosophy does not a line with mine. So I know that I should not run it myself.
Use what ever you want, I am certainly not here to tell you to use opensuse, and I hope I did not come across that way.
My point about the resources thing was not that they had low resources, its that their resources were not willing.
IIRC opensuse legally can not distribute Nvidia drivers to begin with. The drivers HAVE to be maintained by a 3rd party. If no willing volunteers step forward, then the drivers don’t get implemented.
Ubuntu has drivers because they worked out some sort of deal, and most other distros are in legal grey water. Or so I have been told.
Its not an excuse. I just want to make sure you know whats really going on. I just see way too many people go onto the opensuse forum and bash people from the opensuse team for not shipping nividia drivers in the official repo when they simply have their hands tied behind their back.
The nvidia driver is not in the repo of many distro, kernel updates do not break users systems. but we are going around in circles so I’ll drop it here…
You hit the nail on the head with your suggestion that they are not willing. That is very telling…
Just to be clear, I never said they are not willing. I said they don’t have the time. I mean that quite literally. The guy who made this thing is a maintainer for Xorg. I don’t even want to think how much work he has to do with that project alone.
It sounds like you think there is a group of snobby IT guys who are like “ha, fuck the noobs, lets not give them Nvidia drivers”.
At the end of the day, I just want you to know that opensuse is comprised of a very rag tag team of volunteers who do truly care about the user experience. Yes it takes them a very long time to get around to certain issues. But they are just exceedingly busy people with full time jobs and families.