Zypper dup freezes while retrieving packages

I have been away for about 6 weeks, and haven’t updated my tumbleweed installation in that time. I’m back now and trying to run zypper dup fails; it just hangs after a couple minutes. When I restart it it seems to be nearly the same result every time, although it seems to hang on different packages every time. htop shows nothing using significant resources. I am not sure what to look at next to troubleshoot.

Interestingly, it seems that switching to a Wayland session fixed this. I guess I shouldn’t have been using X11 still anyway. Still think there might be a bug here but at least my system is updated.

Are you sure it is zypper that is frozen? I have seen it several times in KDE - Konsole output stops but zypper continues to run and completes.

I believe I have seen it in Wayland too.

Yes, I’m sure it’s Zypper (or PackageKit?) because it happens in Discover too.

Zypper vers discover. two different programs with out much in common. tot ally different back-ends. Maybe a problem with the mirror you are using???

Weird. I don’t know much about the backends and Discover doesn’t provide much info about what’s going on, but it would hang around 60% without being able to cancel. It worked fine after I switched to Wayland though.

Sorry, I’m on Leap, just being curious:
Is it really advisable to do the upgrade from within X11/Wayland? For Leap the documentation of the online upgrade strongly recommends to do this outside the graphical mode.
After all, you always perform a full system upgrade with Tumbleed, each time. Am I missing something?

On Tumbleweed it is not a full system upgrade each time.
Maybe there is only an update for your browser for example or just a few apps.

The correct way to upgrade is:

  1. Open a Terminal/Console (in KDE called Konsole)

  2. Type: sudo zypper dup (Enter)

Can also be combined with zypper ref like so:

sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper dup

Using Discover or any graphical update can cause problems.

When you have the autorefresh “on” for your repos (as is the default), there is almost never a need for an extra zypper ref.

Ad when you are using KDE, there is “Terminal - Super User Mode” item in the Main starter > System. No need for the silly sudo then.

Also, when there is a really large Tumbleweed snapshot (like there was with the new KDE 6 some time ago), one should not do this from a terminal emulator within the desktop (and in the mentioned case certainly not when the desktop was KDE), but from the virtual console (and maybe even in Multi-user mode and not in Graphical mode).

The above to warn that the saying

isn’t true IMHO. There are (as always in Unix/Linux) more correct ways to do something. And in the case of upgrading Tumbleweed, a bit of checking what is going to be done and then adapting to it, is not a bad practice.

Then stop preaching about

every time someone mentions it.

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