Differences Between Ways of Upgrading Packages?

General system
1

Simple question: I’ve been using the command that is in the Welcome, which generally uses the UpdateinTerminal command.

I know about Pacman and using that with -S for none AUR packages. I also know about using yay to upgrade AUR and install from AUR. However, it appears that just typing yay in terminal does everything or does the same as the UpdateinTerminal command? Am I missing something???

2

UpdateinTerminal is using pacman first for packages from repos and after this completed it uses yay to update if AUR packages are used on your system…
But yay alone will work also for updating both.

3

UpdateInTerminal is almost the same as running yay, but it has a special safeguard for Nvidia graphics card users.

If you are using packages nvidia and/or nvidia-lts, UpdateInTerminal will check that when there’s a kernel update, there must be an nvidia driver update as well.

So:

  • if linux is updated, nvidia must also be updated
  • if linux-lts is updated, nvidia-lts must also be updated

If these checks notice a problem, UpdateInTerminal will warn about it and let you decide whether to continue the update process or not.
Continuing likely causes the next boot fail.

If you are using nvidia-dkms package, or if you don’t have an Nvidia card, UpdateInTerminal works essentially like yay.

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4

Oh okay. All AMD here. I ditched NVIDIA a couple months ago. Was tired of some of the hoops I had to jump through. Especially when I was back on Fedora. It worked, but I had the chance to purchase an AMD GPU so I jumped on it and things are smoother on GNU/Linux now. So in my case I can just yay going forward. Thank you for the info!

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5

Just a note - if you do happen to have flatpak - don’t forget to flatpak update occasionally as well.

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