Of course it’s his choice, it’s his system.

The general advice is that handpicking updates from main repos is a big no-no. There are only a couple of reasons you would ever need that, like updating archlinux-keyring on a very outdated system.

Even on my 13 year old install with many thousands of packages, it’s not hard to spot if anything is out of the ordinary when doing huge upgrades. You should pay attention.

That being said, I often just do pacman -Syu --noconfirm && poweroff these days. It’s so rare that anything breaks and I can very easily fix it if it does.

Just look at their principles.

If your upgrade says anything out of the ordinary, which it most definitely did here, that should probably trigger something in you. This is the case for any distro.

Same, my desktop PC had Arch installed in 2012 lol

Arch is definitely not “an experimental distro”. It doesn’t just break, and all the software in their repos is considered stable.

If you have been using Arch for any meaningful amount of time, the massive output from OPs upgrade should be glaring.

The whole point of the update is to avoid the silly Windows-like mentality of flatpack. It splits the package up so you can choose what you want instead of installing a bunch of crap you won’t ever use. If OP had been awake while doing a full upgrade on his bleeding edge system, he would have noticed.

Yeah I can’t believe he’s been using Arch for 5 years and didn’t even bat an eye over the massive pacman output

When an upgrade spits out that much text, you should bat an eye.