as a user I meanwhile have become very careful about OS upgrades. My latest try changing from OS13.1 to 13.2 taking 1 of our 5 computers as a test machine, turned into a big mess: I had to reinstall the OS completely and I of course took 13.1 and not 13.2, as I did not want to invite the same problems on the others computers as well and don’t want to maintain a mixed environment. . Unfortunately I still don’t know whether it were/are problems with the hardware, incompatibility with software running well on OS13.1, drivers, dependencies or whatever. So no criteria on my side to find a solution.
As I am no longer willing to invest a huge amount of time in investigating OS upgrades and risking completely new OS installations, I simply would like to know whether it is possible to have a roll back to 13.1 from Tumbleweed or Leap in case that severe problems should arise ?
Sorry to read about your disappointing experience.
You can’t stay on 13.1 forever ( well, you can but I wouldn’t suggest to do so ). TW is out of the question ( rolling release, so “upgrade” at least every week ). Of course you could manually roll back to 13.1, but IMHO chances are there that that’s going to be time consuming too.
My 2 cents: move to Leap, in case problems arise, post here and let us help you get around those problems.
Not much more I can say, we would need more info about your machines and your openSUSE installs.
The OpenSUSE 13.2 DVD had problems with PCs with older disks (63x512 byte boot sector) when accepting install defaults (BTRFS filesystem for /root, say). That means almost all PCs originally shipped with Win XP or early Vista before 2009 maybe. If that is your case, it’s a known problem fixed in LEAP.
Be aware that LEAP is 64bit-only, just in case. Apart from that, if a PC is running OS 13.1 it should be able to run LEAP; if you describe your HW, the Community around here should be able to alert of possible corner cases and advise on available workarounds…
I agree with previous comment re Tumbleweed consuming additional and ongoing upgrade time, depending on how frequently you choose to install the upgrades. Choosing a longer gap between upgrades could save some work time but expose you to managing the impact of bigger changes and any fallout from that.
The Evergreen project is planning to pick up support for 13.1 in January, to be continued through November 2016. This should overlap the period of Leap 42.1, which gives you plenty of time in which to decide and prepare the migration to Leap either before or when Leap 42.2 is released.
The last Evergreen release was 11.4, supported through to July this year - the team did an excellent job extending maintenance - I used it through to the end in parallel to 13.1 and Tumbleweed. For further info on Evergreen: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Evergreen
Before doing something like that, my advice (as always, if you have seen many of my previous posts in other threads) is to always make a full backup of the drive(s) before doing any such intrusive task.
SATA: AHCI
Secure boot: OFF
Network Stack: Disabled
After the update to OS 13.2 everything seemed to work, but then the virtual box failed. The Win7 64 pro client crashed and I could not start it again. I had a copy of it, of course. But then I also got direct problems with OS 13.2 itself and at the end KDE crashed and I landed in text command line mode. Could boot again, but it always crashed after login.
Anyway as it happened already some months ago, I do not remember any further details and I think its better to change to Leap as suggested. So lets look forward:
Is it possible to update OS 13.1 directly to the current Leap version ?
After the update to OS 13.2 everything seemed to work, but then the virtual box failed. The Win7 64 pro client crashed and I could not start it again. I had a copy of it, of course. But then I also got direct problems with OS 13.2 itself and at the end KDE crashed and I landed in text command line mode. Could boot again, but it always crashed after login.
Looks like a “disk full” problem of sort: did VBox fill all of your remaining /home with its virtual disk?
Or do you have too many filesystem “snapshots” around? Or is just the Journal filling up /var/log without recycling?