After a couple years on Fedora I decided to do one more Distro hop- to one I have little experience with, openSUSE.
But it seems the everything from the installer, philosophy, package manager, configs, and general way of working is just very different than every Distro I've tried before (Debian/*Buntu, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo)
Like what's up with YaST? It's like a system-wide settings/configs program plus a package manager front end unique to openSUSE?
And to update grub it seems the best command is "update-bootloader" - for example. This isn't standard on anything else afaik. Is there anywhere other than practice I can learn all of these quirks?
Most modern distros are either new distro trying to have more modern sensibilities, distros based off of Debian, Arch, or Fedora, or occasionally original things that are okay with being superficially similar to one of those while doing things differently at lower levels. OpenSUSE is one of the few remaining distros from the olden days that has been independent and doing their own thing for decades without spawning a bunch of forks or dying off. If you want to try something even older and crazier Slackware is sure an experience.
you may not know this, but suse was originally based off of slackware way, way, waaaaay back in the day before changing over to a jurix base.