I hate when this happens

At least you were likely informed 631 times. Windows would have done this on the 2nd available update:

When you update on:

Windows: Oh no, not again.

Linux: Great, more free features.

Mac: Oh cool, only 20 €

Why hate?

Yeah, hate that too. You just do your thing on your full-featured desktop ignoring updates for half a year straight and suddenly there are over 600 updates completely out of the blue...

@Oktokolo considering that it includes most if not all packages installed in the system, i'd say that its a good deal.
You have updates to system, all tools, libraries and drivers in one place.

Windows updates only system components, and you have to take care of things like VSCode, python, node, web browser, blender etc.

Well the alternative is nothing gets maintained...

@Oktokolo actually those tend to pop up in bulk every so often. Haven't been at the computer for two weeks or something this time

@MammaNeedHummus well, using a point release distro would reduce continuous updating until the next point.

Realistically the first 600 of those take 3 minutes to install, 15 are bigger and take a while to download but give a you an accurate progress bar, and 16 are from the AUR, you will have to compile them for an unknowable amount of time, 4 will fail and 2 of those will be fixed in PRs that aren't merged yet.

Also 2 other random AUR packages on your system will break because of ABI changes but you won't discovwr this until you try to use them.

I actually think most of that should be Haskell, Texlive, Python. If those three infrastructures receive a major update at the same time, they can easily kick that number over 200 or even higher.

@lorentz Yeah you're actually mucho correcto. Tensort is shit to update because it requires me to download some proprietary shit and provide for the build in some funky way