openSUSE is a really good and modern linux distro, people complaining about here probably haven't used it in a long while. Whilst i worked in A&T we handled a few thousand+ servers running SLES 11 SP2 and it was solid.

I think they're biggest handicap is they're not from the US and while i worked there people acknowledge they have horrible marketing. Also being bought and sold a few times doesn't help, and with the HPE acquisition a few years back, a lot of employees (on HPE side) simply left.

The kubic project has developed the only viable alternative to CoreOS that's being phased out. Unfortunately where MicroOS falls short is SUSE's stubbornness for using BtrFS, which causes a lot of headaches and has been dropped from all major distros at this point. People in the kubic project have also been contributors to kubernetes, kubeadm, OCI, (they even contributed a lot of code to podman, from Red Hat) and they've been a significant driving force for rootless containers https://rootlesscontaine.rs/. It's weird they're not more often in the limelight with all the hard work they do, but maybe they'll take this opportunity to fix their marketing and steer into a better direction :).