In addition to the good advice @chikenf00t and @joekamprad have offered, eos-update is a useful script created by the Endeavour team, for updating your system.
See @manuel’s topic about it here:
An example of how to run it:
eos-update --yay
To list installed packages, use the query argument Q:
yay -Q
Q: Query.
You can pipe that to grep if you’d like to filter that list. Useful if checking for particular packages:
yay -Q | grep package-name
As for removing packages, to remove just the package, use the R argument:
yay -R package-name
R: Remove.
Doing that is fine, but it may leave some orphans (dependencies that no longer have any parent package installed). To clean those up after, you would run:
yay -Yc
Y: Performyayspecific operation.c: Clean.
This one below removes a package and all its dependencies, and also packages that depend on it. It’s very thorough but be careful with this one, some packages (eg: ffmpeg) are so intertwined you might end up removing half your system:
yay -Rcns package-name
R: Remove.c: Cascade, removes packages that depend on this package (be careful!).n: No-save, ignores backup designations.s: Recursive, removes dependencies also.