With the last version update to 11.2, openSUSE became useless for many companies and enthusiasts.
It no longer supports PowerPC systems, which are in the long term the best solution for servers (and consoles).
Also the remaining Intel version of openSUSE 11.2 seems to bring no benefit over the previous 11.1 release.
   It looks much uglier, it has more bugs in KDE, and it is bloated and slow like hell. After starting the OS, it rattles the harddisk for several minutes, which openSUSE 11.1 didn't do. I looked in top, and it seems to do some useless things with mandb and find.
   Is the involvement of Microsoft in openSUSE reason for this? Did they force the PowerPC support to end, as PowerPC is made by IBM, and recently Microsoft also got rid of PowerPC from their XBOX consoles (for the XBOX720).
   The openSUSE developers say PowerPC was "only" used by 0.3%. I bet they didn't take into consideration that one PowerPC system can consolidate about 600 Intel systems (according to a New York Times article by IBM) . And what they didn't think about at all, is that many people who use Intel openSUSE, actually are planning to migrate their servers to IBM PowerPC, it's just not something which happens at today, or which even shows signs anywhere, as it requires lots of planning and decision making. But when it happens, a lot of Intel platforms will be consolidated.

I was forced to look for new alternatives, since openSUSE does not work on my hardware anymore (I have openSUSE 11.1 on my Sony PlayStation 3 and IBM System p), so I tried FreeBSD and Debian.
I've been running Ubuntu and Mint in parallel to openSUSE (on my Intel desktop) for years, and openSUSE was always the better OS. But now things have changed.

FreeBSD is really nice, as it is a completely own OS, not based on Unix, Linux or anything else. Linux is basically just a kernel, but FreeBSD is a whole OS with seamless integration of kernel and UI, kinda like AmigaOS. It needs a lot of finetuning to get everything to work, which is quite fun, and reminds me of the old days with the first Slackware Linux distros (from which openSUSE is also derived), when Linux was still in version 0.9x. The ports system is really cool, as you can compile any new software with one command ("make install clean"), and it compiles and installs just fine. The performance of Windows apps is good, but it doesn't run everything out-of-the-box, as it needs some deeper tuning to get things to work.

Debian 5.0 is simply amazing. First of all, it's much faster and smaller than Ubuntu and Mint, while Ubuntu is a derivate of Debian, and Mint is a derivate of Ubuntu. I don't quite understand why someone even made Ubuntu and Mint, as they only have more bugs, are slower, are more bloated, and don't support the hardware which Debian supports. For beginners, Debian is much easier to setup than Ubuntu and Mint, but of course for professional people also.
   The most amazing thing about Debian however is, that it runs Windows apps faster than Windows XP. No other OS, no other Linux wine has done that before. I tested a Leadwerks Engine 2.3 (it's a AAA OpenGL engine, with fully dynamic realtime shadows and lights, more advanced than CryENGINE 2) app which ran at 303 FPS under Debian, and 301 FPS under XP. Windows XP again runs Windows apps faster than Vista and also faster than Windows 7.

I will keep an eye on NetBSD and FreeBSD 8.0, but so far Debian just rocks in every aspect an OS can rock.