I presume that if I don’t care about altering appearance or some other nuance, I can continually keep the same instance of Endeavour OS, simply updating it regularly with
sudo pacman -Syu
I’ve been doing this for a while now and my system runs perfectly well. I see no reason to install or “upgrade” to another version. Unless I am failing to appreciate some subtle nuance, I presume that I can continue to maintain my system this way indefinitely, correct?
Yes, indeed you can. There are no “versions” to update or install to. 
I generally keep my installs going until the hardware fails or I choose to retire it.
Thanks. I have a correct understanding.
Appreciate it!
Welcome to the world of rolling release. One other thing to do is run yay -Syu to keep aur packages up to date (yay will also check the other installed repositories and take the place of running pacman as well).
I’ve been quite happy and content even without the use of yay.
I ran it just to say that I did and there are no additional updates for the software that I choose to currently run.
Thanks for telling me about it anyway, thanks!
yay simply updates AUR in addition to your installed repos.
If you don’t use AUR packages, it won’t update anything additional.
Actually, if you regularly run pacman -Syu then yay -Sua will suffice for updating ONLY AUR installs. This is how I run my system - still troublefree…
That is just extra work without the extra benefit. 
The nuance is to check for any .pacnew config files and run pacdiff to view and select what changes (if any) you want to keep. You can check them out either using the tool in the Welcome app or with a program like Meld or Vim.
For example, there was an update to Pipewire not too long ago that left users without working audio unless you included the changes in the .pacnew.
If you want to make sure you have little trouble, I would also suggest checking the Arch news prior to updates making sure no manual intervention is needed. Keep at least two kernels, one of which is the lts kernel, and read up on system maintenance, and I know a number of people with 5+ year installs that are still going strong.
Yeah, right, no? Since months all I do is: yay. No syyuu and other attributes.
yay manages all-in-one, no?
Indeed it does.
It first updates the repos and then AUR.
There are benefits to splitting off the tasks - depending on your time management as much as anything else. I far more often want a pacman update than I want an AUR update - often because I know which things in the update list are ‘wanted’. I run with a scrolling list of pending updates, so I always know what’s coming…
The AUR updates, OTOH, are rarely needed/wanted as soon - and I may or may not have time to build them in the ‘time space’ I have allocated (internally) to updating. Running pacman often takes under a minute (if no kernel!) - but an AUR run is several minutes at best.
Choice is still a wonderful thing! Certainly doing it all at once is also a worthy goal - and one command, perhaps once weekly, is certainly simpler than my way (and even less typing!).
Choose YOUR way, for YOUR reasons - and enjoy!
You could topgrade. . .
I just run yay haphazardly …I guess if it blows up one day I will boot to a previous btrfs snapshot.
