I'm relatively new to openSUSE, having used it for a bit less than a year. I've been kinda surprised at how good it is.

I think a lot of people are surprised by OpenSUSE actually, I know I was.

I used Fedora for a very long time, and always faced problems with updates. Everything would be fine, then I would "yum update", and one of the updates would break something. For example, I once "yum update"'d two of my Fedora machines, and instantly all of my CIFS remote mounts on those two machines died. Nothing I did would bring them back up, then about 6 days later another "yum update" fixed the CIFS libraries and my remote mounts popped back up. If you've ever seen people post about how Fedora is an "experimental" distro for RHEL, there you go...

On the flip side, my CentOS and Debian machines are SO slow to implement updates and bug fixes that they face the opposite problem. For example, my desktop PC at my office runs CentOS 6.3. Every couple of months, it starts to give me errors when I try to open new terminals. In fact, here is the exact problem:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=667539
It's been going on for YEARS, yet Redhat (and by proxy CentOS and ScientificLinux) haven't responded to it at all. Notice the dates on that bug report...first reported January 2011, then closed August 2012 not because the problem was fixed, but because the distro that it was first reported on became obsolete.

This is the problem with server distros, they're so incredibly slow to respond that if you do encounter an easily solvable problem (in fact an ALREADY SOLVED PROBLEM), it's not going to be fixed for years to come.

In comes OpenSUSE. In my experience it's the happy medium between the 2-3 year old server distros (Debian/RHEL/CentOS) and the .0001 year old experimental distros (Ubuntu/Fedora). Things just WORK, and they work well.

In fact the only problem I've ever experienced with my OpenSUSE systems has been when trying to install a rolling-release update (11.4 to 12, 12.1 to 12.2, etc). This is admittedly buggy, however this can be avoided very easily by:
1) backing up the existing system
2) install the new system
3) restore any backup files that contain config files that are needed to restore functionality (namely the files in /etc/ and /home/).

I was wondering what the results would be, but my colour vision isn't good enough to make head or tail of your pi charts!

Hi David,

If you hover over one of the pie charts a menu pops up above the question title which allows you to switch to a table view. You can click the columns to sort. Not the best UI but it works.

Ah! Interesting results, presumably influenced by where the participants came from. Arch second to Ubuntu was rather surprising, and Xfce second to KDE says something about Gnome.

I posted the link here and on reddit r/linux r/linuxactionshow Would have been a bit stupid to post it in the ubuntu or arch forums.

The thing I found most surprising was mageia got hardly any votes but is second on distro watch.

Why did you decide against a poll on LQ?
I may take a look at your poll when I have a PC in front of me but it seems odd to take people off-site dor a poll and it may influence the outcome.

I didnt know you could do one on LQ. I just typed online poll into Google.I initially posted it on Reddit. I didnt think many people would respond but over 2500 did! I think the results are pretty fair. The backend has a find cheaters feature which is pretty nice but didnt find any.

Interesting results. Okay, so what happens if a person clears cookies, starts a new browser session, and votes again?

Their IP Address would be the same

Done!
Mine is Debian + Gnome 2 :)

I know from when I used to use PCLinuxOS that folks at their forums love to encourage voting in polls/surveys. It strikes me that this survey has only 8 votes for PCLinuxOS at this writing. Just wait until they and the Mint users find out about this one. :)

Ahhh a classic! Thanks for voting.

Yeah I was worried about that happening. Do you think I should stop the votes? Votes have pretty much stopped now. 2600 people though not bad.

No, I don't. With any poll, there's potential for inaccuracy, but I'm thinking that more votes is better. Anyway, these things get people talking, and I think that's good.