I like the fix the stability comment. Tumbleweed may well do that.
Opensuse offers several options in terms of stability. The most stable was the xx.4 version each year but they have recently changed to the xx.3 version. Many people only run these and only upgrade after the updates have stopped which I vaguely remember is 2 years after the release date. Some stay with earlier versions of these as just like the final yearly upgrades the get more stable as they are updated. They have recently added Evergreen which provides additional updates even after the 2 years. Not that I have found that useful.
People need to ask themselves how stable/bug free a system they want. Running the latest greatest of everything is unlikely to be bug free. The main reason for upgrading is often because a particular application no longer supports the release. OpenSuse Build Service often takes care of that aspect. That can also been needed after an upgrade as an application may not have caught up with the latest even stable release.
As a for instance I am running opensuse 11.4. When I want to install an application there is often an rpm for 11.4 on it's site or in the build service. I'm changing machines so I have just installed 12.3 on the new machine. From the general use point of view - the desktop - nothing has really changed. It probably comes with a newer LibreOffice release that I could probably have installed on 11.4 or got very close too. There will also be other newer apps in 12.3. When I came to install my favourite photo processing package I found that I couldn't use the latest from it's web pages so had to use the build service release. That will probably happen again even though 12.3 has been out for some time now. And so it goes on.
You really need to ask yourself what you are upgrading for and what you want to get out of it. Fortunately Linux plus a Desktop is nothing remotely like windoze especially in respect to windows this that and the other. Desktops are pretty mature items these days and often so called improvements are just the same basic things - windows of one sort or another, just presented in a different way. Even a slightly modified method of using icons gets called a widget. A folder an activity. These are basically a folder and so it goes on. The only real change is probably the intro of touch screens. And in the case of opensuse 11.4 against 12.3 the underlying software that makes it work.
John
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