Fedora vs openSUSE

[Rameshwar Kr. Sharma]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 11:01 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:

> 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.

Well said, but I just wanted to learn the Linux from the basics ->
right from the first step. So if Fedora really gives all such issues,
should I go to openSUSE?