After reviewing posts, and resolving my issue with Plasma 6 upgrade by running “zypper dup” in tty full screen console to complete the update I wanted to ask the following:
Is there any reason not to make this my preferred practice for Tumbleweed?
Should I login to the session with my username, or is root access preferable?
Yes, in particular when basic elements are to be upgraded. The basics are very easy, you do not change a tire while driving the car.
You can either first login as a normal user and then “become root”, e.g. with
su -
Or you can login directly as root. Doing it directly is not a good idea when doing from remote, but when you are sitting before the system, then you can do it directly without extra security worries IMHO.
Perfect, thanks much for your response.
I just run sudo zypper dup into a terminal app and everything works fine. The only time this became an issue is with the KDE Plasma 6 upgrade. Unless the desktop environment itself is being upgraded, you should be fine just using a terminal app.
I at least didn’t encounter any issues with updating via discover or terminal that I’m aware of in the 9 months or so that I have been using openSUSE Tumbleweed so far.
SDB:Upgrade Tumbleweed - openSUSE Wiki mentions that you should switch to a TTY though, so if you want to completely prevent anything from going wrong, switch to a TTY.
It works most of the times really, but the terminal session may be closed for an update to the terminal app itself or some related background process, or the compositor, or something related to video drivers (well, the session might not crash itself but you may not be able to view errors and take action etc. ) so unless you use a VTx or screen or tmux you are at risk, so why not using a VT?
… and doing some work in the GUI while an upgrade is underway may cause your work to be lost if any underlying app is being updated…
Of course when you update your cycle that is standing in the barn and not change the tire of your running car. that may be fine.
But then you have to check what is going to be updated and what you have running every time. Thus many do not take the chance.
And yes, Unix/Linux is very forgiving here. Because e.g. removing the old executable file of a running tool does not remove the space of the file, but only the pointer (in the directory). And the kernel will only release the space when the number of users that have the file open is 0 (zero). Thus the tool will carry on. And at the same time starting the same tool will start from the new file (the new version). But this will run amok when a product consists of many files. A program of version A can, while running, open e.g. some module that then might already be of version B.
I remember that sometimes (running Leap, thus the number of packages to update are mostly much less then in Tumbleweed) doing an update with Firefox involved, the running Firefox instance became unresponsive. Killing and restarting of Firefox repaired that.
Understandable. Usually if it’s an update that replaces a lot of packages, I just reboot the computer anyway afterwards.
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