Leap 16 - no offline upgrade available?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hello!

I’ve been using openSUSE since version 13.1 and always upgraded using the “offline upgrade” method - download the ISO, burn it to USB stick, boot from it and choose “Upgrade”.

I decided to follow the same way to upgrade my current Leap 15.6 system to 16.0, but it appears that this method is no longer available? I downloaded Leap-16.0-offline-installer-x86_64-Build171.1.install.iso from official mirror, verified the SHA256 checksum, wrote it to USB stick using dd and booted from it.

Differently from previous versions, the boot menu does not have an “Upgrade” choice. The only choices are “Boot from Hard Disk”, “Install Leap 16.0 (x86_64”, “Failsafe – install Leap 16.0 (x86_64”, “Check Installation Medium” and “Rescue System”. I tried the “Install Leap” choice, but as expected, it offers to do the clean install deleting everything on the disk, so I bailed out.

Can anyone confirm that offline upgrade is no longer possible (I didn’t see this mentioned in Release Notes)? I could of course try the online upgrade with zypper, but it has always seemed more dangerous to me so I’ve avoided it until now.

2

The vast majority of Tumbleweed users online upgrade using zypper, as often as daily. Of my 7 16.0 installations, 6 were online upgraded from 15.6 using zypper. Zypper competence is well exercised, and very high when instructions are followed.

3

Leap 16 has a very different repository structure compared to Leap 15.6, so upgrade is not a trivial task.
Unless you know what you are doing, perhaps using the [opensuse-migration-tool](https://github.com/openSUSE/opensuse-mig ration-tool) is the easiest route.
Otherwise you have to manually adjust the repo definitions.

Details here: Upgrade_to_Leap_16.0

4

Not only does Leap 16 have a different repository structure, not all packages available in Leap 15.6 are available in Leap 16. For example, Leap 16 only has a small number of 2024 Texlive packages, not the full range of 2025 Texlive packages available in 15.6. Other omissions include Gnumeric.

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