You can do it, too.
Not sure how that would be a problem, but I guess Itās possible. An easy way to see whatās up is just type:
checkupdates
and itāll tell you whatās waiting. I think it came with pacman-contrib - but either way it works well 
Or - if youād rather have a count:
checkupdates | wc -l
Or - run conky with a check for updates service. Or - tweak the EOS-notifier to your liking. Or (all of the above)
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Yeah, thatās how Iāve always done it.
From the Arch wiki:
The bash script checkupdates , included with the pacman-contrib package, provides a safe way to check for upgrades to installed packages without running a system update at the same time.
Conky all the way, I need this on my desktop 
If youāre referring to yay, then the answer is no. It is not a safety risk, it does exactly the same as sudo pacman -Syu, but as a bonus, it will also check for AUR updates after the pacman update is done.
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Yes, but if you do sudo pacman -Syu and then do not update (press N), thatās the same as doing sudo pacman -Sy, right? The database is already refreshed, isnāt it? 
Conky in action:
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Yes. If you type yay, let it refresh the database but then donāt let it update anything you have refreshed databases but you are not updated. This is still technically OK.
However, if you then install something, you could be in a partial update condition.
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Yes, thatās exactly what I meant. Thanks for confirming my suspicion.
No, pacman -Syu is looking for package updates, pacman -Sy is checking the database
But then itās the user who creates this partial update condition, not the command.
pacman -Sy refreshes the package database.
pacman -Syu refreshes the database and performs the update.
yay is the same as pacman -Syu (plus the AUR stuff).
Now, if you run pacman -Sy your database is refreshed, so if you install a package it can be of a higher version than packages on your system, thus breaking dependencies (so-called āpartial updateā scenario). So you should not do that.
However, if you run pacman -Syu just to check if there are updates available (without actually updating - you press N to not download and apply the updates), your database gets refreshed the same way as if you ran pacman -Sy. So if you then install something, you can get in a partial update scenario. So, this is generally not a safe way to check for updates.
Thatās why checkupdates script exists.
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Our lines got crossed, I thought that you meant that yay -Syu was unsafe i.c.w. pacman -Syu.
yay -Syu is redundant, itās the same as just yay, so it is generally unsafe if you use it only to check for updates (i.e. you press N and not perform the update), because it refreshes the package database.
In general, neither yay nor pacman are safe to check for updates in the repos.
However, yay -Qua is safe and can be used to check only for the AUR updates.
I always use checkupdates and yay -Qua to see if there are updates available, when I donāt have the intention to update straight away.
I understand it, but I read the initial comment wrong.
These are the two comments Iām referring to. But this is a downside of a forum. Whilst typing an answer the thread grows along and you miss the context. Thatās what I meant with our lines got crossed. 
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I feel like I am watching one of those deliberate miscommunication skits.
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Just another variation of the old kidās game āTelephoneāā¦
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Yes, I found that in the post, but my issue was that I could not read the news updates, which kept flashing. I would click to read and then it just went away. I use pamacās notifier for the updates. Is the EOS Update Notifier tied to Firefox directly?
No, it works independently, but if you use Pamac, eos-update-notifier is overkill indeed. For the really necessary manual interventions, we will notify you also on the forum or Telegram.
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