What harm would there be in running strip on all files?
It's not the case for Linux (just checked...), but on other systems (such as BSDs, e.g., OSX) doing this will remove any setuid/setgid permissions as a side-effect. Also (still looking at OSX), the ownership of the file may change (to the user doing the writing).
For Linux, I recall that early on, stripping a shared library would prevent linking to it. That is not a problem now, though as the Program Library HOWTO notes, it will make debuggers not useful. It prevents linking to static libraries.
Further reading:
- 24.14 Don't Use strip Carelessly (Unix Power Tools)
- How do I strip local symbols from linux kernel module without breaking it?
- What Linux and Solaris can learn from each other
Most distributions, including OpenSUSE, strip executables as part of their build scripts. You don't need to strip on the system's executables because it's already been done.
There are binaries that must not be stripped. Package maintainers take care to use correct build options to avoid stripping them. This includes binaries that load libraries dynamically in unusual ways, doing some self-introspection rather than normal startup-time loading or a plain dlopen. This also includes many executables that consist of bytecode plus a bytecode interpreter for which strip mistakes the bytecode for debugging data.
A side note: if you want to save space, OpenSUSE is not the right distribution for you. OpenSUSE has very coarse package granularity. For a smaller system, use a distribution with finer package granularity so that you can install only the parts you need. In the desktop/server range, Debian and Arch are good choices. You may also consider distributions that target embedded systems such as WRT.