After a couple years on Fedora I decided to do one more Distro hop- to one I have little experience with, openSUSE.
But it seems the everything from the installer, philosophy, package manager, configs, and general way of working is just very different than every Distro I've tried before (Debian/*Buntu, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo)
Like what's up with YaST? It's like a system-wide settings/configs program plus a package manager front end unique to openSUSE?
And to update grub it seems the best command is "update-bootloader" - for example. This isn't standard on anything else afaik. Is there anywhere other than practice I can learn all of these quirks?
openSUSE is one of the old desktop oriented distros. I find it somehow similar to the old glorious Mandrake (r.i.p.). Like it it's a European distro and both of them are relatively KDE centric and so also somehow similar to Windows. So the philosophy behind both of them is to be user friendly in the way you can do relatively much with the central configuration panel.
Man Mandrake brings back some memories. It was my first linux install solely because they had the fastest shipping time for install cd's and at the time I was on dialup so I couldn't just download anything I wanted. I ran it for several years and ended up on a few different distro's and freebsd for a bit.
I think so. GNOME is more an American thing what you can see from its similarities to the Mac OS desktop layout which is still not that popular in Europe. KDE is also a German project and more similar to the Windows layout. And Windows in the last time often steals ideas from KDE^^
People always say GNOME is more like macOS - but as someone who really likes the macOS UI I really cannot stand GNOME3. I've tried but I just can't do it