I need advice. Last month, I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed, but now I am considering "downgrading" to Leap 15. Tumbleweed has been rock solid for me and I've not had any problems. However, the daily updates and the fear that the system could break wear on me.

My question has to do with updating Leap. I read that within 6 months of a new minor release, one is expected to upgrade to the new release. How does one do this upgrading? Do I have to re-install openSUSE every time there is a new release or can I upgrade similarly to the way Tumbleweed upgrades, that is, through a distribution update (dup)?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

no reinstall required,

the short version::
you change the 14.2 repos to the 15.0 repos, and run `zypper dup`

you can also download the usb/cd installer, boot from it and say upgrade the system, than it will do so

if you use any 3rd party repos, it depends, you might want to disable them before the update, consider the docu of the 3rd party repo

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for your very helpful post! That clears everything up. Looks like it is pretty easy and is much better than, say, Linux Mint that requires you to reinstall it every time there is a new release.

Just for info, there has been an in-situ upgrade path for Linux Mint ever since Mint 17 (perhaps even further back than that, but I didn't use it before then), and this will continue in a month's time when you will be able to upgrade Mint 18.3 to Mint 19 in-situ, with no need for a reinstall.