On 20/02/2021 09.09, Robert Hardy wrote: Just two comments ...
That said, I did maintain a Tumbleweed installation for a couple of years using zypper up and lots of package cleaning using Yast. I still have that installation.
Tumbleweed must be updated using "zypper dup" every time, not "zypper up". Similarly, if you are testing the 15.3 beta, it has to updated using "zypper dup".
Consequently one practice I borrowed from my enterprise days has been to /always/ perform a proforma upgrade. I keep storage on each machine to which I can copy my production system, test the upgrade process and then exercise the post-upgrade system with a representative suite of tests. The most difficult problems I recall have invariably been with graphics or new hardware. Or with KDE - which I blame on myself for stubbornly continue to use it.
That's actually sort of difficult for a home user with one cheap, old computer.
My trick in that case is to keep one small partition, say 10 GB (I have one with 8) for testing the incoming new version, installed new at some point. When I upgrade the main partition, I can use the test partition for comparisons and tests. But having at least one external hard disk into which doing a full backup, at least prior to doing the upgrade, is unavoidable. Typically with laptops, people also have a windows partition. It is good to have in that external disk an image (dd) of the windows partition for recovery in case of disaster. One strategy is to have in the external disk one small bootable partition - say XFCE on ext4, 15 GB - and the rest of the disk is one huge btrfs partition, encrypted and compressed. I don't particularly like btrfs, but it is the only (major) linux filesystem that supports compression. Then you can do rsync backups into it that result in less space. Modern laptops with USB3 handle an external hard disk as fast as if were internal. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.2 x86_64 at Telcontar)