Basic questions

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1

Hi. I’ve been running an older version (11.3) of openSUSE for several years. Time to upgrade. I’m having a hard time understanding if I should go to “Tumbleweed” or “LEAP.” I don’t need cutting edge releases. Is LEAP the way to go?

Also, can I upgrade directly from 11.3 to one of these versions?

I’m running CLI only, so I don’t have a GUI for my OS. Advice for the easiest way to do this upgrade?

2

Personally, I recommend either going to 13.1 (the Evergreen version) or 13.2, for the time-being, until the early bugs are worked out of LEAP.

… unless, of course, you would like to contribute to the bug-reporting and solving part of the process.

Also, can I upgrade directly from 11.3 to one of these versions?

The short answer is No … and Yes.

  • No: if actually upgrading the installed version. You are advised to upgrade one version at a time; and
  • Yes: if you do a clean install of the system, but preserve your /home partition

I’m running CLI only, so I don’t have a GUI for my OS. Advice for the easiest way to do this upgrade?

Others here can give you better instructions than I, so I leave that for them.

3

I would not recommend an upgrade from 11.3 it is too large a change.

Backup /etc and any databases that may live on root. back up your home partition, note all major apps you need/use. install fresh a new version not formatting home, just mount as /home
Install the apps you need
Use the backup of /etc as a reference to configs for the apps you install. (in general do not just copy /etc since structure may change in such a large jump)

4

On 2016-01-25, jwdenzel <jwdenzel@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com> wrote:
> Hi. I’ve been running an older version (11.3) of openSUSE for several
> years. Time to upgrade.

Good idea. Just backup all your data and configurations first. Also, I’m not sure how old you hardware is but if it’s
32-bit, you should know that Leap only supports 64-bit.

> I’m having a hard time understanding if I should
> go to “Tumbleweed” or “LEAP.” I don’t need cutting edge releases. Is
> LEAP the way to go?

If you don’t need cutting edge, then Leap would be better than Tumbleweed. Leap is the new openSUSE `official’ release
whereas Tumbleweed is the rolling release.

Also, can I upgrade directly from 11.3 to one of these versions?

In principle incremental version upgrades are possible, but 11.3 is so old that I’d recommend a proper install.

I’m running CLI only, so I don’t have a GUI for my OS. Advice for the
easiest way to do this upgrade?

I’m not sure for Leap, but I suspect it’s the case (as was for previous openSUSE versions), at the time of installation
when you select with DE, you can still choose to install `No desktop environment’.