I found today that I’m unable to check for updates using the GUI. Using pamac in the terminal works fine, but the GUI is stuck at this screen:
type in the terminal: checkupdates enter
That command appears to run successfully (no errors shown anyway), but it still doesn’t fix the mentioned issue.
That’s true, of course, it doesn’t fix Pamac’s malfunction - but it has the potential to let you sleep better. In addition, you are no longer dependent on a GUI.
I already wasn’t dependent on the GUI because as mentioned in the post, pamac in the terminal worked fine.
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Do you have the AUR enabled in Pamac? aur.archlinux.org has been hit pretty hard lately with a DDoS attack. Perhaps Pamac is trying to get through to it and can’t?
While I have the AUR enabled in Pamac, I use it there only for searching. I use paru for installation and maintenance of AUR packages. Several times in the past few days it has reported that it was unable to reach aur.archlinux.org:443. I just shrug and try later, which usually works.
pamac uses a local AUR cache. It does not access the AUR server directly.
Ah. Shot in the dark. Missed.
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checkupdates doesn’t give any messages after running. That’s pretty unusual for a Linux CLI application.
I stopped using pamac (GUI or CLI) and prefer running the two native commands for updates instead giving me the expected information. Even my wife started doing it as a GUI junkie 
sudo pacman -Syu
yay -Syu
If you are lazy, you can put both in a shell script.
Apart from that, checkupdates doesn’t check AUR packages obviously. I have AUR enabled in pamac GUI but it sometimes doesn’t work (maybe due to the problems AUR has at the moment)
e.g. i am running MS Edge (sorry, i have to for work). There is a new version available, but pamac doesn’t notify me. running yay instead updates the package directly.
What’s important to know in this case is that pamac does not access the AUR directly. Instead, it uses a local AUR cache. By consequence, it cannot have anything to do with the ongoing DDoS on the Arch and AUR servers.
yay on the other hand is an AUR helper, and it accesses the AUR server directly without using a cache. Likewise for octopi if you want to use a graphical package manager — octopi requires an AUR helper such as yay or trizen in order to be able to install packages from the AUR.
If the pamac command-line interface does not show any AUR packages, you can try using the --aur option. And if you have any .git packages from the AUR, you can specify that too. 
pamac update --aur --devel
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Many thanks for the detailed information. Might be helpful for one or the other.
I am fine with using pacman and yay 
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$ pamac info microsoft-edge-stable-bin
Name : microsoft-edge-stable-bin
Version : 139.0.3405.119-1
Last Modified : Mon 25 Aug 2025 21:00:36 BST
pamac checkupdates --aur
interesting. Maybe a timing issue where it wasn’t available for me at the time i checked and it tried to gather a cached version.
Pamac uses an AUR mirror aur.manjaro.org that might not be able to sync to AUR server if AUR server is down
status.archlinux.org - AUR history logs
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