Dear openSUSE folk, 20211126.
My wife uses openSUSE Leap (currently 15.3) KDE DE on her laptop (an old laptop circa Windows Vista era).
We have a problem in that while I am alive , it is easy for me to support her and make the annual point changes to LEAP. So she works safely on current version. She has no interest in understanding how openSUSE works.
I have a question?
If I was to change her to Tumbleweed rolling version, and taught her to do
“sudo zypper dup” would she be able to keep it going for many years?
Thus question resolves to does Tumbleweed always update correctly from “sudo zypper dup” for the foreseeable future?
If not, an alternative is to go with Ubuntu LTS which can be set to update to the next LTS version automatically. *
Thus in absence of a help desk person in house, how can one preserve an undemanding user on openSUSE?
Wife uses: Thunderbird email, Mozilla Browser, You Tube, Gutenberg site for old book reading, general news sites, and needs to be able to use video chat (uses Zoom with ladies’ organisations) Jitsi meet with family and Packman for essential video codecs to use with our UK BBC national news channel.
My kindest thanks in advance.
from your aged friend,
eionmac*
I find the Tumbleweed has unexpected problems as it is bleeding edge. I would not recommend it to you unless you are comfortable with figuring out what broke in today’s Tumbleweed update.
I am a retired NCR/HP engineer and I help most of my former associates keep their OpenSUSE up to date via either teamviewer or anydesk.
I find that most prefer the MATE desktop as it looks and feels like Window XP or Vista.
Some have had me move them from 42.1 to 42.2 to 43.3 to 15.0 to 15.1 to 15.2 to current 15.3.
I have scripts that do most of the work - they only have to login as root and type the password and start the final step and say yes to all the license that pop up ignoring the request to install anyway.
If you like the more complex KDE - that is fine - I hate it myself and use MATE, it is smaller and faster - I also avoid btrfs and extra partitions - drives are big enough now that other than the UEFI boot partition and swap everything else can go into root with no issues. ext4 is coming up on 20 years old and bug free.
Do you have a backup of your computers - everyone I support has a backup drive and backup script and a 32gb USB bootable OpenSUSE to restore the backup should things go south.
You have 2 cents (pence?) on your question.
You can leave me a private message if you want more help.
I am afraid you misunderstood the OP. Nobody in his story passed away (so no condolences needed).
The scenario he tried to bring over is were he, being the system manager/asministrator for his wifes system, passes away. Leaving his wife with an unsupported system.
It might be a good idea to associate with a local Linux User Group (LUG) if you have no family or friends capable of stepping into your shoes for $SUBJECT. Having your wife do it with you could be even better.
I wouldn’t recommend TW. Here’s a non extensive list of how it can fail:
A package doesn’t build posing a conflict for updates
Packman mirror goes away
Xorg is removed from distro
A new sound/video middleware is created which requires manual configuration
HDD gets filled with logs and doesn’t boot anymore
A hardware component fails (not TW related, but it’s an old laptop)
Something that we cannot even predict
I won’t judge and understand if the user don’t want to spend time learning ins and outs of the system, but I won’t recommend TW and probably not even another Linux. A tablet with managed updates on the other hand seem to be a good fit.
Wife uses: Thunderbird email, Mozilla Browser, You Tube, Gutenberg site for old book reading, general news sites, and needs to be able to use video chat (uses Zoom with ladies’ organisations) Jitsi meet with family and Packman for essential video codecs to use with our UK BBC national news channel.
Tumbleweed fits the above. Somebody will help duping once or twice a year.
Thanks for this. I use and am a member of a LUG but they are about 560 miles away physically, so I like others are ‘corresponding members’ by email. They have taught me a lot over the years, but too far away to physically help. No local LUGs available.