What does openSUSE have to offer for a long-time Arch user?

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So I haven't done any distro hopping for a long time. I've settled on Arch Linux as my daily driver some 7-8 years ago and despite it feeling a little overwhelming at times, I quite enjoyed the challenges it provides as opportunities to learn more about how computers work. I'm in no way a professional IT guy, just interested in the subject and use my computer for pretty mundane taskst, such as office work, internet browsing, media consumption, a bit of gaming and photo editing.

I liked the way Arch lets you pick your own destiny and I can pick which software I like best on each level, from boot loader, to display manager to desktop environment. I use KDE plasma, for example, but don't like their default text-editor very much, so I don't have to install it and can just use gedit instead.

I'm happy with my main machine running Arch, but I have two other machines that I don't use very regularly, and maintaining those in Arch, even running the regular rolling release updates is impractical, so I decided to switch them to a different distro. One is an old laptop, that I use in a different room for my Online Pen&Paper Sessions, the other is an abomination of spare parts, at my parents house, (I call it Frankenstein's PC, with an old AMD Athlon CPU and 4 Gigs of RAM), that I only use on occasional visits, if I have to absolutely do something that is too annoying to do on my phone.

Would openSUSE Leap be a good pick for these use cases? What advantages does it have to offer? What do you think I will enjoy or find annoying, coming from Arch?

I'd be happy to read about your experiences, opinions and suggestions.

As a former Arch user that has been (and still is) using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for like... 9 months? I would summarize it like this: DON'T SWITCH.

At first everything will feel pretty good. Latest software like Arch, but with the BTRFS config OOTB, which feels like "wooow, this is really cool".

But then... You'll slowly start seeing the problems.

Some other comment said zypper was better than pacman. That's absolutely not true. zypper is way slower, and search works horribly. Even with the new parallelization system, things are definitely worse.

Also, the paru/yay equivalent experience (non-official packages) is bad, really bad, not only because of how little software actually is there, but also because things are not as well mantained, and stuff like codecs will make you cry.

And for the stability of Tumbleweed... My system, and several apps have been broken too many times in these months of usage, and stayed broken for weeks without a fix. It's not like Arch didn't break on me. But not this frequently, and not without quick fixes.

Yeah, that snapshots system is not something exclusive to OpenSUSE. Fedora does it too. And it's not like you can't configure it in 15 minutes with the Arch wiki.

I use Tumbleweed because as soon as you install the system, it offers these features.

🛡 openQA-tested updates — every snapshot is tested before release.
🔁 Btrfs+Snapper — full system snapshots & instant rollbacks.
🔒 Secure by default — SELinux, AppArmor, hardened setup.
🧠 Consistent packaging — no random AUR scripts.

In my opinion, Zypper offers better dependency resolution than Pacman. I have been an Arch user, and the system is good if you do not install random scripts from AUR. It is curious how in Linux we believe that it is more secure than other systems, but then we install random scripts from AUR on a system that, in the case of Arch, is complicated to maintain the enhanced security of SELinux, for example.