The SUSE engineers and community really make some fantastic tools. I was a long-time openSUSE user but I found the package repositories were not so well maintained and eventually I switched away, but tools like Zypper (the only mainstream Linux package manager that gives you fine-grained control on what to do if a package dependency cannot be fulfilled - a pet peeve of mine on Debian systems), SUSEStudio (web service for interactively building Linux appliances, Live CDs, etc) and it's back-end Kiwi, etc. - really very cool stuff.
I find zypper is SUSE's killer app that gets very little love from people unfamiliar with it's use. Yum is a close second but I never understand the love afair people have for apt-get it makes me want to scream all the time. The very terminology of update doesn't update your software or machine but that upgrade does update but does not upgrade you to the newest release is enough crazy. Also apt-get search != search is also crazy.
That surprises me. I've used Fedora for a while (it was preinstalled on a laptop that was gifted to me), and found that the repositories were both much smaller and much less well-maintained than the equivalents on openSUSE.
I have found a few handy tools that openSUSE had packaged long before Fedora. I think the credit for that goes to openSUSE's much more accessible build service :) Haven't had any issues with the repositories, myself, though - been using Fedora on and off since F11.
It mostly does. There are a few things that are in openSUSEs main repositories and not in those of Fedora, but in many cases the openSUSE packages were indeed in user repositories.
Fedora repositories were so bad for me that I ended up searching for Fedora packages on the openSUSE Build Service, and using those instead.
