Summary: A reminder of the unappealing nature of OpenSUSE due to a release cycle of 8 months and support span of just 18 months

JUST as we mentioned the other day, OpenSUSE cuts the line of support for 11.3 and moves ahead to 12.2. As the official blog post put it:

As Benjaman Brunner announced yesterday, openSUSE 11.3 has reached end of life. As a quick refresher, openSUSE releases new versions every 8 months, and each version has a life cycle of 18 months. As 11.3 was released in July of 2010, the time has come to embrace our newer versions, including the successful release of 12.1 in November of 2011.

A year and a half of support is very little although Fedora does not do much better. Yesterday I installed Debian GNU/Linux on two machines, knowing that it would be supported for a long time to come. Why do people feel as though OpenSUSE is still competitive when better options exist that also get long-term support? Experience suggests that many of SUSE's users -- especially corporate users -- just happen to be in the same country as SUSE. Is that really a proper selection criterion? ⬆