OpenSUSE is about as middle-of-the-road as it gets. It’s a great distribution for someone who has outgrown Ubuntu but doesn’t want to do absolutely everything on the command line the way you would with Debian and Fedora. Its development cycle is 9 months, which puts it between *Buntu/Fedora (new version every 6 months) and Debian/Centos (new version every several years). Its packages are new, but not so new that they’re bleeding edge. I quite like it.
YaST, the OpenSUSE’s control center, helps you accomplish tasks that a power user might want to do - like setting up a Samba file server - that you’d have to do manually otherwise.
And if you do decide you want more modern packages, there’s a whole selection of third-party repositories in the Open Build Service.
I mentioned CentOS earlier.. You have any idea what happened to it?
Thanks FRiend!
Good to have some reinforcement! I have linuxMint and openSUSE downloading now. I’ll look at both.
I have NO interest in a mostly commandline OS.... but I do want that option. I want to look at the newest “newbie” Linux as well as an established “power users” version. I’ll then make a choice on what works best for me.
I’ll be really happy if the “newbie” type will do everything I want....