So, here’s my wonderful experience trying to upgrade from 15.6.
First, I made a clozilla backup because that’s just good practice. Then I tried to use the migrate tool. I tried to migrate all my 3rd party repos so it could use them with the upgrade, but it didn’t want me to. In any case, it failed to do anything, so I used the offline installer to start from scratch.
Next, no form of gui could run, since it kept complaining about AMD Secure display. It’s for a Ryzen 3200G from so long ago, which never gave me an issue before. Anyhow, let’s just use the failsafe option.
After learning how to get it to just chose the same partitions I had, via my phone web browser, it did install. However, it kept the same nomodeset and other stuff from the install, probably because I had to use it to get the installer to work. I decided to just try again to migrate, so I restored my / partition and /boot. So far, so good.
Well, the migrate tool failed to work again, so I tried to do a fresh install. Oddly enough, the partition tool kept complaining about not having a boot partition, despite me specifying my /boot. I was puzzled as to why it complained this time but not the last. Ok…
Anyhow, I think it was happy if I moved a partition around by only 3MB to give it what it wanted. I wish I took a picture of it, because what happened next was a bleep show.
It “installed”. I rebooted, and it panicked because it couldn’t mount any partitions. Not even the new reformatted ones.
Ok, I’ll just restore them via clonzilla again. This time, however, that didn’t work. The computer just gave me a flashing cursor. I go into the UEFI, and there is no boot info anymore. WTF?
I tried to rescue the system with a 15.6 installer. It found everything, booted ok, ran the yast bootloader tool, but that did nothing. Huh.
Well, my theory is the partition tool in the installer, complete messed up the gpt or whatever, and everything was broken, even the windows install. So, I had to use clonezilla to reimage the entire drive to fix it. Nothing else short of it worked.
At this point, this gave me vibes of installs of Suse back from 15 years ago, where stuff was new but not really ready to go. Or it just flat out didn’t work, and I just waited for the next .x release. The partition tool needs a lot of work, and if anything, needs the previous function of just reimporting old mount points. For that matter, the installer should be able to reimport old user accounts too.
I get it. I know Yast is dead. I know the installer Agama, is decent, and with time, copilot and whatever, will work fine and will be the future. But this just isn’t here yet for me. I don’t want to use a migrate tool to upgrade. I should be able to do that offline like before.
The thing is, this particular computer is just used to game, so I’m fine just leaving it on 15.6 for now. Heck, I might downgrade it further because I want to use a working form of Ishiiruka, because it still lets me do save states without all the controller nonsense Dolphin does.
I could move to another distro, but they are all moving to this direction too.