Other linux

[Yasha Karant]

I fully realise that this is a SL list (along with the occasional 
mention of RHEL, CentOS, etc.).  I currently am using X86-64 SL 7 on my 
workstation.  Our primary research compute engine is using X86-64 SL 6 
with MPI and Nvidia CUDA.  A colleague here refuses to allow the 
migration from SL 6 to SL 7 despite my success in migrating my 
workstation (with Mate as I personally dislike both Gnome 3 and KDE 
Plasma having now had to use both).  Because my laptop is over 5 years 
old, I acquired a new HP ZBook 15 mobile workstation, provisioned to 
support a 64 bit X86-64 OS.  I was planning to install SL 7, but now 
need to decide between that and OpenSUSE 13.2 or possibly, if can we 
afford the licensing fee, SLES 12 or SLED 12.  I have looked at the 
OpenSUSE listserve more or less equivalent to this one, and find fewer 
professional threads and discussions, although it does seem considerably 
better than what I recall a student showed me from Ubuntu (Debian 
derivative).  I am not asking for any postings back to this list; 
however, is there anyone with SL experience who also has OpenSUSE or 
SLES experience?  Advice would be most appreciated.  I am going to be 
installing OpenSUSE 13.2 on the new laptop, but backing off to SL 7 if 
it proves unsatisfactory.  I particularly am interested in OpenSUSE in 
production university or research entity environments -- not enthusiast 
home use to replace, say, MS Windows or even Mac OS X.

Yasha Karant