A fresh review of Opensuse 10.2 seems rather critical of its package management subcomponent. Overall, it is not a negative review which goes along the lines of "nothing to see here, please move along". And yet, it does appear to suggest that Ubuntu is a small step ahead of Opensuse.

I have mixed feelings about openSUSE. On the one hand, it feels like a polished system, and that is reflected from the installation to YaST. Yet, if we take away YaST for a moment, then openSUSE looks a little weak. It feels sluggish, and has a user interface that isn't necessarily better for the user compared to a standard GNOME interface. It has the cost of deviating from the norm, while gaining very little from it. Compare it to, say, Ubuntu or perhaps even Debian, and openSUSE really doesn't stand very well.

Put YaST back in, however, and openSUSE has a fighting chance. I would go so far as to say that YaST is the best configuration utility I've used. Unfortunately, I don't think that's enough - Ubuntu manages to keep GNOME looking normal, and seems to work better out of the box, from little things such as ejecting USB sticks to big things like package management. If you're not going to miss YaST, then you probably want Ubuntu. If you still want the big box of options, then PCLinuxOS might have the answer. openSUSE 10.2 is a good distribution, but I can think of at least two others I could recommend instead.

This is not the first time Opensuse loses to Ubuntu Linux.