@toadie Usually I update whatever Arch Linux derivative I have WHEN they’re on my main system; otherwise I update them when I’m using the system they’re on. I’ve gone with two of them; the other one I’ve used in the past seemed Okay but it would frequently mess up, so after a couple of strike outs, I moved on: the casualty? Manjaro Linux.
The one surprisingly that’s worked as long as I keep up with it is Cachy OS. I have found, however, IF I happen to install or reinstall a fairly old ISO image containing Cachy OS, it wants me instead to download the latest image instead of doing a large over the air update.
The other one that USUALLY works really well for me is Endeavour OS. Unfortunately I’ve found a couple of exceptions to that too. For almost two years it was beautiful then something funky happened, probably in the middle of a significant update and it more or less trashed my really nice setup, so I moved on for a while.
Not long ago I returned with a new image and it was (and is) mostly fine, EXCEPT that yay was having some issues with the AUR packages, so I reverted to pacman for a daily update, then ran the EOS versions from their Welcome screen to 1) do the equivalent of the pacman update (and that worked), THEN I did the EOS equivalent of yay -Syu with their EOS update + AUR, and that took care of my issues, so IF I run into problems again I’m going to go to their two tools, which seem to do a really good job of correcting any oddities that occasionally surface, so HUGE kudos to the EOS team for their tools, which appear to tame both pacman and any AUR additions to the standard configuration!