I'm pretty sure opensuse is upstream from sles and probably closer to fedora than centos stream.

> Leap uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), which gives Leap a level of stability unmatched by other Linux distributions

https://get.opensuse.org/leap/15.5/

AFAIK, comparing to what Red Hat offers:

* openSUSE Factory is comparable to Fedora Rawhide (upstream "development" rolling release);

* openSUSE Tumbleweed is comparable to CentOS Stream (upstream "stable" rolling release);

* openSUSE Leap is comparable to SLE and RHEL (stable conventional point releases).

There isn't really an equivalent of Tumbleweed in the RH ecosystem.

CentOS Stream maintains various API and ABI stability guarantees whereas openSUSE Tumbleweed just upgrades you to the latest version regardless, once it has been tested in Factory a bit.

And only one half of Leap is comparable to SLE (because it literally is SLE), the other half is rebuilt from Factory; it's like RHEL + everything that doesn't exist in RHEL from Fedora.

I think it's good that everybody is trying slightly different approaches, keeps things more interesting.

Stability-wise, it's more like this: * openSUSE Factory is comparable to Fedora Rawhide (upstream "development" rolling release); * openSUSE Tumbleweed is comparable to Fedora * openSUSE Leap is comparable to CentOS Stream * SLE is equivalent to RHEL (stable conventional point releases)

(ex-SUSE here)