I’m a non technical newbie. No knowledge of Linux or command line. One of the few commands I know is sudo zypper dup which I do everyday.
TUs, at first glance, look interesting. As a non technical newbie with no knowledge of Linux or command line, would it be unwise for me to explore using TUs? Also, I have very limited free time to research Linux stuff.
Do TUs operate like zypper dup? (everything gets updated). Or do TUs only update one specified package at a time?
Is TU on Tumbleweed a mature technology? Or is it new and buggy and error prone?
Does using TUs involve remembering a bunch of commands?
Do not worry about using transactional-update. Just continue to update using zypper dup as per usual. That is the recommended update tool for Tumbleweed.
As a newbie the best thing you can do is following the standard recommended practice, which includes “zypper dup” for updates as @hendersj pointed out.
Tumbleweed is fairly solid these days, but expect the occasional glitch or error message once in a while; keep asking here in the Forums if you need help and don’t be afraid of the command line, often it is the quickest way to report results and solve problems when helping somebody remotely.
As a general advice, don’t add complications to your system unless you know what you are doing, for instance don’t add (too many) extra repositories or install fancy packages via “One Click Install” (which also installs the relevant repository).
Before playing with TU, I would explore what zypper can do, try in a terminal
man zypper
or
zypper --help
and remember that all of us were “newbies” once upon a time
