How to know if there are updates

General system Newbie
21

The first one - changes to your DE must be specified what is meant with that, but generally speaking those are no new packages, but just settings.
I use Arch Update Counter for KDE - nice little tool and way less “intrusive” than conky…

22

I use PAMAC. I like the bright red tray indicator. Can’t miss it when it is there. Just edit /etc/pamac.conf. I set RefreshPeriod = 1. And since I have decent internet, MaxParallelDownloads = 35. And NoUpdateHideIcon. But I update through the terminal; sudo pacman -Syyu. Enjoy!
Pamac

23

Package in the sense I use it is meant what you can install on your system. It can be an application, a library that is used by an application or even documentation or fonts in example. A package is just a format for different kind of files that can be installed by your systems package manager and is then managed basically (for updates and to prevent conflicts). Each package can contain multiple files and even multiple programs.

So when I say “package” in this context of our discussion, then I mean in example firefox, which provides me Firefox browser, vulkan-headers providing some drivers or rustup package, which provides me about 10 different programs to help with writing and compiling in the programming language Rust.

24

…Syu… is enough.

25

Try conky maybe…

Create .config/conky/updates.conky

updates.conky script

conky.config = {
– Conky settings
background = true,
update_interval = 30,
double_buffer = true,
no_buffers = true,
imlib_cache_size = 10,

– ==> Window specifications <==
gap_x = 0,
gap_y = 0,
alignment = ‘bottom_right’,
own_window = true,
own_window_type = ‘dock’,
own_window_transparent = false,
own_window_argb_visual = true,
own_window_argb_value = 125,
own_window_hints = ‘undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager’,
own_window_class = ‘conky’,

– Text
use_xft = true,
xftalpha = 0.1,
font = ‘Atkinson Hyperlegible :size=10’,
draw_shades = true,
draw_outlines = true,
default_color = ‘#aaaaaa’,

total_run_times = 1200,
};

conky.text = [[${execi 3600 checkupdates | wc -l} Updates!]];

Then create a conky launch/kill/refresh script:

#!/bin/bash

if pgrep -x "conky"
        then killall conky
    else 
        conky -d -c ~/.config/conky/updates.conky
fi

Add that to startup, or a shortcut.