I’m sorry but I genuinely don’t see any miscommunication 
Well, yes, that’s exactly what I meant 
Okay, I’ll stop now…
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Ok, got it…eye to the forum and finger on the trigger. 
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I have a bit of a question here. In pacman man files, it mentions that pacman -Qu works better if pacman -Sy is run first. Is that going to leave things in a potentially ‘iffy’ state, then? I guess the bad things are rare, though - because I think I ‘live’ in that state, and don’t necessarily run pacman -Syyu before I add something…
Is checkupdates the only safe way to get the info that -Qu would give you?
Is checkupdates basically specifying a separate copy of the db to update for its information, thus leaving the ‘real’ db alone?
I may have to rewrite the service, and the lua code to operate more safely!
I’m not sure how checkupdates does it’s magic, but I’m 100% sure it does not touch your local package database, because in order to do that, it would need sudo privileges (and it doesn’t).
It might be worth digging into the code to find out.
If you are lazy, you could also use the Welcome from @manuel :
eos-welcome
then just click on the Update System button then it will open the terminal and update… 
For now we have it in these languages :
DE / EN / ES / FI / FR / IT / PL / RO / SK / RU
You could change the lang by
els-welcome lang=fr
For those who want add his own language not on the list and want to translate it, just let us know…
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I based the question on a quick look at the code - but I don’t know how fakeroot works, so I’m not sure. I still suspect I should rewrite the service, though. The output from checkupdates seems to be generated the same way (pacman -Qu), so it wouldn’t require much work in the lua ‘reporting’ function…
If we were lazy, we’d be on Ubuntu 
Actually, we are lazy, and provided we have the information that it’s needed, typing update (an alias for an alias that calls su -c pacman -Syyu) is faster than finding the Welcome app! (useful though it is, especially when welcoming - and for reflector-simple - and for the Personal Commands)
Be lazy is not a particularity from Ubuntu, you have right to be lazy sometimes even here or love to click, you have the choice !
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Yup - far more choices than things to do! 
The EOS notifier drove me nuts because it always had an update. So I just removed it and I do updates the same as I do on Arch → Saturday mornings after setting timeshift to run and then after I make coffee. You don’t need to practice Zen if you don’t have notifications. 
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It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
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You don’t even have to configure it. All you have to do is click the Don’t show me anymore or See you later button. If necessary, you can re-enable the Welcome pop-up later.
I tried that, but the “later” button, was not…later. It was like a car alarm that kept happening when you least expected it.
In my opinion, the later is really later. The window may pop up at any time at random. If you are bothered, use the Don’t show me anymore button instead.
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Hard to see you saying that, without calmly stroking a long white beard…
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Based on this, the following questions arise. Could EOS be called real unstable distribution? I wouldn’t think that would be true. Does the EOS match the unstable Manjaro? It may be closer to reality.
Essentially, it uses a combination of fakeroot and pacman flags to download the remote database to a temporary location and compare against the local package list. (I think the main “downside” is that it clears its package database every reboot, which is not ideal… reading, it looks like you can override CHECKUPDATES_DB so it doesn’t put it into /tmp, then there’s a little more persistence.)
Useful tip: checkupdates -d will download updated package files ready for installation without creating a partial upgrade situation, then you can pacman -Syu when you’re ready.
e.g.:
alias cu="CHECKUPDATES_DB=/var/tmp/checkupdates checkupdates -d"
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Wow - I love this idea. If I throw this in the service, then when I update it’ll be done in no time (as well as providing the info for my conky about what’s waiting). Thanks - it’s always good to learn something useful!
Oh what poppycock. It’s far more poiple here.
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I have done before pacman -Syuw to download the updated packages to be installed with
pacman -Su later. Is this kind of equivalent to your method above?