Checkupdates is a good tool avoiding any need for period pacman -Sy
jobs from root crontab, however it works by maintaining its own
database in /tmp by default (and _that_ is a tmpfs by default) so on
every initialization it would stall awesome until it makes the first
sync. Better approach would be to keep its db inside $HOME for
persistence, and then to initiate the first (and longest) sync
manually before converting your package widgets to "Arch C".
All this is the reason I can't recommend it as the default right
now...
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