Judging from some posts I have seen in here, some users who have not used their Tumbleweed systems for some time, have faced problems and either they cannot update those systems anymore or they have to reinstall the os from scratch.
How long can Tumbleweed remain unused without facing such problems and therefore be updated normally after it’s used again?
For example, I haven’t used my system since Saturday, May 2, 2026 when I performed a huge 2600-file update. Today is Sunday, May 10. I may not be able to use it for 5 or 6 more days since I’ve moved to another city and it will take some time for me to build the new infrastructure and be able to have full internet access again.
This may not be equal but, I resentfully rediscovered an old laptop of mine with Antergos installed. Antergos was an Arch based distro that used Arch repos. This laptop has been in storage for years and when I restarted it and did an update. it was large, but I now have or had (a other story) a funconal Arch install.
On some Laptops I have update cycles of 6 month and more (as I’m not using them that often). The only issue I found was that the root partition was getting too small. It was set up in 2012, and at that time 40GB was more than sufficient. So thats a juggle, not to run out of disk space for large updates
Booting a device once per month (or whenever) doesn’t means one doesn’t want to run last versions of software when used.
Plus, motivations can vary. For example, with very old hardware, as Tumbleweed/Slowroll yet support x86_64 v1 whereas Leap 16 doesn’t.
I do not understand. Used for what? It doesn’t matter if it is used for it’s reason of existence by an end-user or not. The system manager (is that you?) should have in his task list to start it up and zypper dup it once a month.
Just my idea and advice. But you asked for if I understand your original question.
And when there is no usage for the system at the moment I would at least clear user data, but probably would destroy all data on disks(s) and store it as something that could be brought to live to install it with what at that time appears to be the best system.
My 32 bit TW installations typically don’t get booted for 3-4 months at a time. I haven’t done a fresh install on any of them since before Leap first existed. Likely most if not all were originally upgrades from 13.1 or 13.2. One 64 bit PC here wouldn’t POST last July. I didn’t tend to its problem until 2 weeks ago. I then dup’d it to 20260430 just fine, after last having been done 20250617. QA and zypper are competent and trustworthy tools.
