>Everybody has to install and try a distro for the first time at some point. Unless you are arguing that you were born with innate knowledge of Suse, then at some point you didn't know either.

No, it's absurd to assume that you can transplant distro packages, not that you can't. And I don't really care to argue with you about this. Your incorrect assumptions are your problem, not mine.

>I would argue that you actually have the misconception, so this is ironically pretty good evidence that "new" or "existing" users does matter.

Wrong. Once again I remind you that you're the one who made the incorrect assumption and got burned by it, so your attempt at deflecting is laughable.

>In the RHEL ecosystem, packages can often be installed on any other (non-Suse) RPM distro, as long as the dependencies are met.

"As long as the dependencies are met" is doing some pretty heavy lifting there, isn't it? And why do you think your attempt to install those RHEL RPMs on SUSE failed?

>For example, Fedora packages can be put on RHEL or CentOS or Alma or Rocky or Amazon Linux or Oracle Linux or Scientific Linux etc.

First of all, four of the distros in that list are intentionally the same distro (RHEL, Alma, Rocky, Oracle), so it is expected that their assumptions and dependencies line up to allow you to install packages built for one on the other.

Second of all, it is absolutely not true that packages from CentOS (assuming we're referring to Stream) and Fedora can always be installed on RHEL or vice versa. The whole point of them being upstream of RHEL is that they can have newer dependencies. Hypothetically Fedora can switch the libfoo package to v3 with a different soname while RHEL still has it as v2, so any package that depends on the v3 soname cannot be installed on a v2 OS or vice versa.

Also, unlike all those distros which are either upstream or downstream of RHEL, SLES is not. So once again I ask, what did you think the difference between RHEL and SLES was? It sounds like you just assumed that SLES is upstream or downstream of RHEL, and made not even a cursory documentation search, nor talked to the SLES reps apparently, to relieve yourself of that assumption.

>I have some packages built for EL9 that are installed on my Fedora machine right now. Putting on a different distro you run a risk of having broken dependencies, but things are largely the same.

"The packages work as long as you ignore all the things that make them not work."

>The same is also true for Debian, Ubuntu, and many other .deb distros. This is far more common in the linux ecosystem than not.

Debian and Ubuntu will have exactly the same problem as the Fedora and RHEL example. Actually worse, because Ubuntu isn't a strict downstream of Debian but a random snapshot of Debian while it's between releases. The packages in Ubuntu can end up not corresponding to any Debian stable nor unstable.

And again, the scenario of taking RPMs from RHEL and trying to put them onto SLES is equivalent to taking RPMs from RHEL and trying to put them onto Debian. If the latter sounds absurd to you, why did you think the former made sense?

>Suse seems to me to be the odd-one-out here.

No, you just have very bad ideas about how Linux works and are weirdly stubborn about correcting them.