zypper dup calculates the required space before starting,
so why doesn’t it check if there is enough space on the partition, and warn you if there isn’t?
This has always been an issue since the the first OpenSuSE I ran many, many years ago.
For me, is primarily something to be aware of only when running Tumbleweed because there is almost no such thing as an incremental update, every update is a full system upgrade, generally replacing over 600MB of files… And for me, the rule of thumb is that for every every existing used byte on the disk, you need another byte for the file replacing the original, and you might need another byte for temporary use. Total then is over 1.2GB of free space but generally speaking I provide a minimum of 2GB of free space… And, of course if you are on BTRFS with snapshots, then your disk usage sky rockets further.
If all of this is disk usage is too much for you, then it’s a good reason to install LEAP instead of TW, your incremental updates will be much smaller if you update often and regularly (tens and at most a few hundred MB updates so ordinary updates should require far less than 1GB in total free disk space).
TSU