I haven't distro hopped much in the past few years, so I am near clueless. I know that Linux Mint has a graphical updater and I vaguely remember openSUSE having it, though I'm not so sure on that one, because as I mentioned, it's been a while. Especially curious if any Arch-based distros have it.

All the Debian and RHEL based ones I've run into have it.

So Debian, Ubuntu, PopOS!, Rhel, Fedora, CentOS for the ones I've seen lately

CachyOS comes with a graphical package manager

It would probably be easier to name the distros that don't have have a graphical updater tool

I think nearly all popular ones that come with a graphical interface at all. There is a graphical updater by KDE called Discover that works on a lot of different distros.

A very good one too.

the mostly populars probably

Most of them offer some sort of GUI updater. Zorin, Bazzite, Cachy, off the top of my head. How intuitive are they? Not. How much user input do they require? In the case of Zorin and Cachy, quite a lot.

If I'm not mistake CachyOs comes with Shelly preinstalled now. While it can be a bit flaky with some esoteric aur packages it works fine for most things: pacman, flatpak, aur, even AppImage but I have not tried that.

Arch-based

It's not recommended, but you can use any graphical updater you want, by installing packagekit-qt6. The reason it's not recommended, however, is that if something goes wrong, you'll have a harder time figuring it out without pacman's logs; also, it won't merge .pacnew files, increasing the chance that something goes wrong after a reboot. If you just wanna use a graphical updater for flatpak stuff, that'd be fine, but you'd still need to use pacman -Syu to update system packages.

As the "graphical update tool" is just a basic wrapper for the normal updater, I would be very surprised if any distro coming with a desktop environment by default has none...

So the answer would be "every single one but Archlinux (nothing by default but the base system) and server installations"

(PS: My "graphical" updater on Archlinux is a handful of very small scripts that a) runs checkupdates and flatpak remote-ls --updates from time to time writing the result into a temp file, b) displays an indicator if that file isn't empty, c) prints out the file as a notification on clicking that indicator and d) runs pacman -Syu && paru -Syu -a && flatpak update && pacdiff in a terminal window when I right click the notification.)

(PPS: Small correction... Manjaro doesn't have graphical updater but a buggy abomination prone to fucking the AUR instead.)

What distro doesn’t? Beside a couple probably.

All the Archlinux based ones, too. (Although I don't accept the buggy mess that is Manjaro's Pamac as an actual tool.)

The only way to get a distro with no graphical updater by default nowadays is using one that does not come with a graphical desktop by default (so archlinux and some server installations...).

Even then, would it not be possible to install a graphical updater on any distro?

Likely it's included in most major desktops.

not so much a specific distro. I know KDE has its own graphical updater in the "discover" app store, COSMIC DE also has its own app store. personally I always update my apps through the terminal as its just faster and easier.

I use bearhub which is a fork of bauh as a graphical updater on Arch when I need one (fairly rare but can be handy)

KDE's discover is not recommended on Arch but I can't recall why.

How are you using pacdiff? I hadn't heard of it until now, and the man page didn't help me.

NixOS

When config files change with an update pacman writes the new one as a .pacnew file instead of overwriting the existing one. That's always an issue with updates on config files (although one less severe on slow updating distros). Do you keep the old config to keep your changes intact while ignoring new default options that should be in there or do you replace the old config with a recent one but risk using manual edits?

pacdiff basically just searches for .pacnew files and then queries you what to do with each.

You can define a viewer via a DIFFPROG= variable (I simply use vim -d because that's already my editor of choice but the package pulls diffutils as a dependency so just diff works, too) and compare the new default config file with the existing one side-by-side (with differences highlighted), so you can either copy your personal edits to the new one or copy additional or changed default options to your old one, whatever is easier. After that you have the option to dismiss/delete the .pacnew file or rename it to replace the old one.

PS: pacdiff is part of the pacman-contrib package. That package also provides checkupdates.

Running pacman -Syu updates your package list to the recent one, then updates all your outdated packages. You are not actually supposed to update the list, then abort the update of packages or just update some of them because Archlinux always assumes up-to-date systems (see: unsupported partial upgrades). So pacman should not be used to just check for available updates without updating. That's where checkupdates comes in, simulating pacman -Syu without actually touching your system and just getting a list of available updates.

PPS: the AUR has a similiar aur-check-updates tools to do the same for AUR packages.

From my experience, most of Arch derivatives.

CachyOS comes with two. Manjaro comes with one. Not sure if Endeavour has one or not now.

openSUSE Tumbleweed has a graphical installer you can use to install, remove, update applications, browse, search, etc. But you still need to run a command line 'zypper dup' to fully update the system.

Garuda has a good one

That comparison is an insult to buggy abominations everywhere, sir!

Tumbleweed has Myrlyn or Discover.

I'd forgotten about Myrlyn. I guess I never switched over to it from the older YaST software updater, which does not have the equivalent of 'zypper dup'. But from what I read now, Myrlyn does, so that is good.

Discover does not, however. Not only does it not do the equivalent of 'zypper dup' it does not resolve package conflicts that can arise with external repos.

For anyone reading whose not familiar, on Tumbleweed, 'zypper dup' (or the Myrlyn equivalent) is what you need to run periodically to update to the latest snapshot (and being a rolling distro, new snapshots come out anywhere from every day to every few days, depending how the automated testing goes).