My question is if you can change version by downloading the iso of the new version and selecting "upgrade" in the Yast installer. Yes. However 15.6 is still in beta, therefore you don't have the release notes with the how tos needed in some version upgrade cases. If you have snapper up and running, I would suggest to: disable all the non official repos point to 15.6 the official ones log out form your desktop environment run a 'zypper dup` from a TTY reboot the system when the update is completed This way if you end up with a broken system, you can roll back. If you don't have snapper, make a clone of your disk by clonezilla, back up your data and update from 15.5 to 15.6. More on reddit.com

Attempting to perform an upgrade from Leap-15.5 to Leap-15.6; the upgrade mechanism has been used successfully for at least the last 2 Leap upgrades; what I did is as follows: Downloaded openSUSE-Leap-15.6-DVD-x86_64-M… More on forums.opensuse.org

Maybe wait until 15.6 arrives before asking that..... You'll get someno-specific answer before then, and yeah, it would be nice to be able to say I went from 13 to 42 to 15 to 16 all on upgrades, even if any tentative official answer is "hopefully", it is unlikely you'll get an absolute before the beta comes out, and even that may come with caveats. More on reddit.com

The Leap kernel is receiving lots of backports even if it looks old if you simply read the release number. It this is not working for you, there's a repo for Leap with the most recent kernel: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/stable:/Backport/standard/ To install a kernel built for Tumbleweed is not recommended. More on reddit.com