I have just recently installed Manjaro XFCE Minimal on two old netbooks for my kids, and now I am wondering if it is safe to stick to the GUI updater to minimize maintenance intervention from my side. I had to enable AUR access because they needs some things from there, so I guess it’s yay running things behind the GUI?
Anyway, I remember at least one time in the past when an update using the GUI broke things, which is why I’m asking.
Personally, I uninstalled the GUI and use only command line for updates. Infact, I created my own KDE plasmoid which notifies me about updates, including AUR, and launches my terminal with the relevant command.
Yeah I remember reading issues in the past about pamac. I’d stick with just running yay on a monthly basis for your kids. It updates on only AUR stuff but all packages from the repos as well. It’s the only thing I use and I’ve never had a problem aside from having to update my mirrors from time to time.
I would say there’s never a guarantee for it, hence the reason I always update through CLI. Though in general, as long as you read the update announcement and there’s no warning not to update through GUI, it should be fine. Still, opening a terminal then typing 3 letters to update both repo and AUR packages is a lot faster than opening the package manager that needs to load the package list first and a couple of mouse clicks to finally update everything. I don’t even know if the GUI package manager can update both repo and AUR packages at the same time as yay does.
Using the GUI to update may - in certain situations - pose the risk the X server breaks.
display drivers - xorg - xwayland - any application directly involved in the graphical presentation pose a potential risk when updated running inside X.
Hi, I just saw your post. I’m using KDE Plasma myself and have been on and off Manjaro since 2017(but I always come back, just goes to show!).
The GUI is there to be used, basically, which is what I do. And, as concerns my first hand experience, well, other than from some rather slight niggles(very rare though I must say) Pamac works perfectly. If a problem shows up ask politely here, which you’ve just done, now, and you’ll get answers and you should be just fine.
Important: read the posts on the forum and check-out what’s going on and take a peek at the Wiki both of which are awesome!
Stay safe 
As the pamac dev, I can’t let think it can be as insecure as said to update using the GUI. In most case it’s perfectly fine. I do all updates with the GUI and the last time it broke it was 4 years ago.
Pamac can also, of course update from AUR and from repos at the same time.
Well, I have been using yay on my own laptop (currently running Arch Linux with Gnome) exclusively and never encountered any problems running it from a terminal in the X environment so far. I can only guess that the Manjaro GUI updater is indeed using yay when AUR updates are enabled as well?
I forgot to mention, that I have installed Timeshift and its pacman hook (timeshift-autosnap) on all machines, so that I can go back to a working snapshot in case something should go terribly wrong.
The goal is to keep all machines up-to-date in the stable branch whenever new updates are available and it’s just more convenient for myself and others, which I have converted to using Manjaro, to using the GUI updater.
I mean, isn’t that what Manjaro is all about (easy access to a rolling desktop distribution)? Otherwise it wouldn’t make much difference sticking to plain Arch Linux instead.
No pamac uses its own code to use AUR.
As long as the GUI updater triggers the timeshift-autosnap pacman hook (and it does) that shouldn’t make any difference (I mean to running yay -Syu), right?
Pamac has been in development maybe for 8 years now, so yes its safe, if a package breaks in Pamac it also break in pacman, depends on personal preference, CLI or GUI.
Pamac never broke an update on me. The only time i updated without it was a few years ago when told explicitly not to use it for that precise one.
Same here, I always use the pamac gui to upgrade unless specifically told otherwise and have had zero issues. I prefer the gui to see what packages are being updated over cli and also prefer that pamac will upgrade the aur and flatpak I have installed
(Late into the party.)
It is very rare that using GUI over CLI will actually matter. It did happen in the past, when the developers strongly recommended to use the command line interface because there was a significant risk of having a crash of the entire graphical interface, but it is very exceptional and not the norm in my experience (several years on Manjaro).
If such exceptional measure is deemed necessary, it will be in the announcement of the update release.
Even if issues happen after updating with Pamac as the graphical package manager, more often than not, there is no tangible proof that the issue is actually using Pamac instead of pacman.
I really doubt there will be a real difference between using GUI or CLI in term of intervention. If there is job to be done, as I said earlier, using GUI or CLI will produce the same result, therefore the same type of intervention should be required.
As Guinux said, Pamac uses its own logic for AUR, so it is independent of yay.
Also, Pamac also has a CLI version. Check out the pamac command in a command line interface. It has a similar syntax to apt from Debian (if you used Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc. in the past, it should sound familiar to you).
pamac help
First, a big THANK YOU to @guinix. I have used Pamac for years and it is the way to download software. I love that you can click a dependency list and view where the software will be installed. I have coded for 57 years and I have had enough of the command line.
gary