That is best way to go I think. Do not know if you have more data (non-system) file system beside /home, they should also be left untouched.
It will probably ask for the root password to be set and create a new root user. Which means that when you have important things in root’s home directory (/root), you must save that firsts. /root will be newly created in any case, because it is part of the / (root) file system, that is re-created as you mention above.
For other users’ my advice is to use the button that says something like “copy users from old system”. Have a look for it. it must be somewhere around that part of the installation of root and other users. You check it and then you are presented with a list of existing users. In that list you can check which ones you want to transferred to the new system. A very, very useful feature!
I am not sure what you mean here. When this is about setting up the connection to the router and the internet beyond it, yes you must define that again. When you mean with “internet accounts” the account you have with your ISP to access the internet, yes that belongs to this. I assume you know all the parameters, in any case you can write them down from the present installation.
When you do not touch the separate /home file system you have and you let the installer copy the user definitions from the old system (as suggested above), your users will not experience differences. The will still have the same usernames and passwords to login.
E-mail accounts are somewhere on the internet, and of course not touched.
The credentials to use those e-mail accounts are often stored in the e-mail client the users use (Kmail (passwords in Kwallet), Evolution, Thunderbird or whatever). And thus on their home directories together with downloaded mails, the mailboxes, all configuration) and thus part of the user data we already talked about in your question before this one.
Thanks Paul and Henk. This is what I hoped was the case. I will get on with it later today. I always approach this process with some trepidation as it never seems to go exactly as I expect, but I get there in the end.
I have reinstalled Tumbleweed and all went well. All users and data retained, even kept the login for my ISP on the modem. Internet now fully functional again. Some third party packages will have to be reinstalled.
As you’ve chosen to stay with TW, you should ensure it’s kept up to date (by using zypper dup), you can follow the factory mailing list https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/ to see when new “snapshots” are issued.
Also, when adding any third party software, do ensure it’s compatible with TW, as your comment “a stream of messages that some dependancy cannot be found” in post #16 makes me think you perhaps had incompatible repositories in the previous install.
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