But a fresh install is not an upgrade in the sense of “zypper dup”, is it? Here my recipe for a TRUE upgrade from the latest Leap 15.6 kernel (6.4.0-150600.23.100) to the current Leap 16.0 kernel (6.12.0-160000.29.1), which I tried successfully a few minutes ago:
Forget about Agama and opensuse-migration-tool and do NOT boot from the downloadable Leap 16.0 or 16.1 .iso. (I tried both for a true upgrade, without success, as described.) Instead, on your currently running 15.6 system, do the following:
Open the YaST Control Center and click on Software Repositories. Delete all of your current repositories. (This will leave your .rpm packages intact, only the 15.6 repo DEFINITIONS will be deleted.) Then, add the following 3 repo definitions for 16.0, which I copy here from https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade, section “Manual upgrade (only for experienced users)”:
| Alias | URI
–±--------------------------±-----------------------------------------------------------------
1 | openSUSE:repo-non-oss | http://cdn.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/16.0/repo/non-oss
2 | openSUSE:repo-oss | http://cdn.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/16.0/repo/oss
3 | openSUSE:repo-openh264 | http://codecs.opensuse.org/openh264/openSUSE_Leap
Enable these 3 new repos (no autorefresh required), click OK, leave YaST and continue in a root terminal, where you type (again, I copy from the site quoted above):
zypper --releasever 16.0 dup
That’s basically all you have to do. How easy and fast, compared to “Agama” and the “opensuse-migration-tool”! Zypper will tell you what it intends to do and ask you if you agree at every stage. In my case, it downloaded and installed about 5000 updated .rpm files. In the process, I had to make about 200 (very easy) multiple choices, 99 % on whether I wanted to replace the 15.6 version of a package by its 16.0 version.
Finally, the openSUSE website and zypper only say: reboot. But before rebooting, you still need to make a new grub configuration file and reinstall that. Otherwise, your machine will still boot with the old (15.6) kernel. (At least it was so on my machine.)
I was pleasantly surprised to even find YaST in my new Leap 16.0 installation!