Pacman shows lots of updates, while pamac shows system is up to date

pacman -Syu shows me there are hundreds of packages (including kernel and sudo patch (probably that vulnerability everyone was talking about a few weeks ago))

But pamac GUI (and pamac update) shows my system is up to date…

Which should I trust?
I much prefer to update my kernel using pamac and not pacman, since pacman doesn’t handle upgrading my nvidia drivers and requires me to manually remove them and reinstall them (or else there’s not X after reboot), while pamac handles it smoothly.

How do I make pamac realize (or when will it show me) there are updates? It says my system is up to date for at least 2 weeks now.

Have you tried refreshing the database in pamac?

Yes, both by pushing the Refresh button in the GUI, and by pamac update and pamac checkupdates -a it still says I’m up to date.

Trust pacman - it is native - and the most trustworthy of the two.

sudo pacman-mirrors --continent && sudo pacman -Syyu

Hi, I had the same issue on first Pamac 10.x releases. Just do sudo pacman -Syyu and then pamac upgrade -a --force-refresh if you have any AUR package installed.

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Thanks, update went smoothly.

I wonder what’s wrong with pamac, though.

I used to always update with pacman, until after kernel upgrade my nvidia drivers failed to install correctly (conflicted with nvidia-utils), and I had to manually reinstall it or it would start without X.

When I raised that issue in a bug report (after the second time it happened), I was told the problem was that I had upgraded using pacman and not pamac, which handles these situations correctly, so I was under the impression that pamac is the preferred way to effortlessly upgrade Manjaro, while pacman requires extra tinkering. I guess it depends on whether pamac feels like upgrading or not…

That was a cheap argument - and most certainly not correct - unless something has changed that I am not aware of pacman is the reliable application.

Pamac is a GUI frontend to libalpm which is the library that comes with pacman.

Pamac is different from pacman in that it can handle several other maintenance tasks but at the core Pamac depends on pacman libraries.

Don’t get me wrong Pamac is a great application and good for many things but in my opinionit can never replace pacman.

I wonder if only the pamac command is necessary in this scenario.

pacman updates a sync database which is located at/var/lib/pacman/sync.

pamac updates a sync database which is located at /tmp/pamac/dbs/sync.

When this problem occurs, it would be interesting to compare the directories in these two locations. I’d even remove the one in /tmp as a next test step. Obviously this is not normal and needs to be fixed. I use pacman, but occasionally use pamac, especially for AUR. I haven’t run into this situation, but it seems to have happened to multiple users.

I see if I run checkupdates another copy of the sync database is downloaded in /tmp/checkup-db-1000/sync.

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