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I have been fooling around with different linux derivatives for my school laptop for about 4 years. I have tried about 5 and I have to say that OpenSUSE is my favorite as of now.

Laptop:

Lenovo Thinkpad T460p.

OS:

OpenSUSE Leap 42.3

Leap vs. Tumbleweed:

Since I use my laptop for classes, I need it to always work without fiddling. Leap has a standard release cycle like standard linux distros. Tumbleweed on the other hand is rolling like arch. This gives you the bleeding edge, latest and greatest packages, but will require more hands on work to get working from time to time. I used to use TW until I got a kernel problem where my trackpad wouldn't restart after closing the lid. Leap is more stable and is what I would suggest

apt vs zypper:

For someone who came from the debian side, it took a little work to get used to the zypper package installer. It has the same commands for the most part so it is nothing too new. It also has a gui counterpart which is nice for new linux users.

Desktop environments:

There are a plethora of desktop environments available in OpenSUSE. I tries KDE, but I found it a little awkward. I prefer Gnome greatly. Keeping the screen clear with the exception of my windows has greatly improved work productivity as flashing notifications do not distract me from my work.

Why Iike OpenSUSE:

I find it has better battery life and performs more smoothly than Ubuntu or Mint. It can do what I need it to do and fester than anything else. It is a nobrainer.

What I don't love:

It uses .rpm packages. Since the most common distros are debian based, .deb is the #1 package. Of course you can build your own from tarball, but I would prefer to have support for .deb and .rpm built in. I know options like alien exist but they break packages more often than not. Things like spotify do not have .rpm support as far as I can find, just to give an example.