I didn’t know this for a long while when distro hopping and since every distro tinkered with grub etc and I really hated debugging grub, and I was afraid of something happening to my home directory, I overwrote it every single time. I wish I have had a separate drive just for it when I began with linux.
Fedora has images which you can create yourself as an enduser which means a corporation with thousands of computers can create their own image. They don’t have to create a new distro. That’s not possible with suse but I don’t know if that’s so important since I do not administer such things. I as an enduser do not care about the underlying system, I don’t tinker with it, I rarely touch it. That’s the case for both distros. I may install a vpn or so.
If you want to tinker with your system, neither fedora nor suse are good for that, using arch is the way to go.
Thx for the elaboration. That’s what I roughly meant with “image centric os”.
Opensuse aeon encourages you to use flatpak. The first thing it does right after installation is to install apps from flathub, including firefox (unlike silverblue).
An example from the doc
For this reason, All Applications, Browsers, Codecs needed for specific apps, etc are provided by FlatPaks from FlatHub.
Especially the following
To reiterate: EVERYTHING should be done via Flatpaks or be installed in a Distrobox if a package is not available as a flatpak. Using transactional-update is strictly what you need for your host operating system to work (exotic drivers, specialized vpn services).
Usually, you do not rollback, you do not go back to an older system. On both systems, you use distrobox and flatpak. I don’t see much of a difference as an end user.
I use fedora silverblue. I’d like to switch to suse microos but the difference is so small that it’s probably not worth it to switch. (Just a guesstimate, silverblue has some goodies afterall with the whole image centric os)
Probably, it’s almost the same for vanillaos. Because everything is within distrobox and flatpak, I do not work with the native package manager anymore (almost, there are exceptions because of the DE).
If I would switch to microos, I, as an enduser, wouldn’t notice too much a real difference.
People should stop making new distros for what should be a post install script. But, things are fucking complicated and that’s why we need the forks and new distros.