Hi there. I’m not familiar with Linux but I installed Opensuse 15.1 back in the day and really liked using it. The one thing that scared me and made me stop using it was upgrading. I haven’t really got a clue how to upgrade and don’t want to be using an outdated OS. I want to give suse another shot but could someone please tell me how easy it is to uprade? On the official download page openSUSE Leap 15.5 - Get openSUSE it says when you boot an older version of Opensuse you can choose the upgrade option.
Is upgrading from Leap 15.1 to Leap 15.5 ok? or is 15.1 too old? Also, will it overwrite the contents of /home? If yes, is there a way to prevent this or do I have to just back up the /home drive?
Also is it possible to do it from the command line (zypper)? Which method of uprading is easier and less complex for a newbie?
Also could someone please reassure me that the upgrading process isn’t so scary
I might take a while to respond but any help is much appreciated. Thanks for helping.
Do not skip a release when upgrading! Example: do not upgrade from 15.1 to 15.4. Instead, from 15.1 upgrade to 15.2, then to 15.3, and only then from 15.3 upgrade to 15.4.
I promise upgrading isn’t scary! Certainly no scarier than the first time you install a new operating system yourself.
Skipping versions is a bad idea generally, because each version expects to be building on the one in the past, so, yeah, maybe not that.
That said, there’s nothing hard about updating via doing a fresh install.
For an anecdote:
I was messing around with something or other in 15.4 on a test machine at one point and ended up with a memory leak that started filling up my root partition. So, I downloaded 15.5, made a bootable USB, and didn’t bother updating, just fresh installed, wiping the old install completely by naming the new root partition to take up the same space as the old root partition. (Custom partition setup helps here). The /home directory was saved and everything worked perfectly. Of course, I did back up the files in /home first, just so I could rescue them if it hadn’t worked. And I was thrilled when I didn’t have to.
Personally, I find installs/updates from distribution to distribution go best for me when I do them via downloading the new distro, making a booable disk (USB/DVD), and working off that. I don’t tend to use zypper dup or anything like that because (a) I’m fairly inexperienced myself, and making sure I have all the repositories right is always a bit intimidating, and (b) I never trust internet connections when I’m in the middle of changing an operating system; Murphy’s law and all that.
If I were in your place, I would ‘update’ via the following steps:
backup /home (or at least everything you want to save from it, I invariably accumulate files that I’m okay with dumping).
insert USB, enter BIOS (may have to google which button to push while you power on), and boot from the USB stick
follow instructions to install 15.5. If you want to get rid of the 15.1 version, you can use the overwrite partition trick I talked about above.
4.5) once you’ve installed it and gotten online, you can use zypper or yast (for someone really new, I tend to recommend yast, since it’s gui based) to update the packages.
Have a Lot of Fun. And Welcome! The community is pretty great here.
When 15.6 comes out, follow the steps to 4, and then choose ‘upgrade/update’ instead of fresh install in 4 and follow the steps to the end.
