Fedora vs openSUSE

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 22:48:48 +0530,
  "Rameshwar Kr. Sharma" <mathsrealworld at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Now since my mind has become a little negative for Ubuntu, I just
> wanted to know the truth (remaining) between opensuse and Fedora, and
> for rest of the distributions more --  I would really not look for I
> would be confused more.

To help us make recommendations, it would be helpful to know how you
are planning to use the system.

Notably Fedora has some features that may make it not suitable for everyone.
Fedora versions are only supported for 13 months, so you will be looking
at doing upgrades once (or twice if you don't want to skip releases) a
year.

Fedora cannot include software covered by patents and hence doesn't come
with support for some commonly used codecs. Fedora also doesn't include
proprietary drivers. While the open source drivers have gotten better
and will be reaching a few important milestones around F17, if you want
to get the most out of your video card you are going to want to use
proprietary drivers. rpmfusion provides support for many codecs and
for proprietary drivers. Using the codecs may or may not be strictly
legal in your juristriction.

I wouldn't write off using Ubuntu for some use cases. They provide long
term support for some of their releases. You could also use their upstream
distro, Debian.

If you want a Red Hat derived distro without buying support, you can look
at CentOS  or Scientific Linux. Those have long life cycles that avoid
having to do yearly release changes.

Also note that using poor security practices under Linux can get your
system owned, just like under Windows.