OpenSuse Tumbleweed: Update to KDE6 - Throws you back to login screen mid update/upgrade
Halfway through the installation it throws me back to the login screen. When I try to continue the update/upgrade it does it again.
I already did a rollback with snapper and forgot to note at which package it exactly happened.
So anyone trying to update, beware that the update might not get through.
I'll wait a week and then try again.
Update
Ashged on reddit:
*Yeah, unfortunately the update doesn't work within KDE. No idea if/when they'll make a fix for that.
The update however works outside KDE, in an IceWM desktop or a TTY. For best results, first log out of KDE, then using Ctr+Alt+F1 go a text based enviroment. Log in there, use sudo zypper dup, then after it finishes, reboot and log in to your regular KDE desktop. Plasma 6 should upgrade succesfully.*
It's updating your desktop so that's why it does that. The safest way is to log out of your desktop session and login via terminal (press ctrl+alt+f1 to get to one) and run zypper dup.
I'm not sure what I did differently. I accidentally updated to Plasma 6 by just clicking Update All in the Discover app. I didn't even realize Plasma 6 was out yet for Tumbleweed. It worked perfectly for me.
I was on Wayland and it kicked me out to login, I tried again and it did the same thing, each time installing a couple more packages. The last time I logged into icewm and completed it and it worked fine. I did wipe out my .config folder so I could start fresh with kde6 though
I followed Ashged's guide to install the update and upgrade to KDE6. It worked and now let's see if I run into any bugs. So far everything seems to work fine.
It's easy enough to containerize an entire DE - but if you did that, you be basically running everything from inside the container - at which point you're back to square one. You're just shifting the problem from the host to the container, and the solution to fix both is the same: restore from a snapshot, reinstall, or actually try and fix the issue.
Also, a DE shouldn't bring down the whole system btw - you should always be able to switch to a second TTY to recover, and/or have a backup lightweight DE that you can switch to from your logon screen. Unless of course something really broke and caused a kernel panic and your system is fully frozen (which should be a rare occurrence on Linux-friendly hardware).
Anyways, a realistic solution would be to use an immutable distro, such as one of the Fedora Atomic/uBlue distros. The kind of breakage mentioned by OP won't be possible in such a distro, because your entire system gets updated as a single image, so it either works or it doesn't (an atomic operation), and in the event it doesn't work, you can always switch back to a previous image from the boot menu instantly. You can "pin" known good images, and this sort of image operations makes it easy to switch between latest testing/stable image version, or even switch between entire DEs with a single command. So if your KDE 6 is broken, not only can you just go back to KDE 5 with a single reboot, you can also switch to a GNOME image, or rebase to something else entirely, without messing up anything, without creating a dependency hell.