Siddhant Khisty pacman -Sy only does grab the most recent version of the package list as you said. The problem is that if you grab the most recent package list and then not perform a system update immediately after , the packages can break because of various dependency and incompatibility issues. Since Arch is a rolling release system, the maintainers always assume that all of the system is updated. In this context, partial update means installing packages right after repo sync ( pacman -Sy ). If it happens that you install a package that depends on a new version of some other package in your system, then things will break. That's why. Good luck and welcome to Arch! :D I'm planning to write a similar guide to yours btw including a tiling window manager setup with awesomewm. Currently in the setup (suffering) phase...
