Little self-plug, I hope that's okay here. A couple of years ago I started writing a little update helper for my Arch Linux setup. But instead helping with doing the updates, it's helping me to know when I should update.

I always found update notifies kind of pointless on a rolling release distro since there are updates pretty much every day. So I wanted something that told me when there is a good reason to update (e.g. there is a fix for a CVE as reported by arch-audit, or there is a kernel update, or there are already 300 packages waiting for an update, etc.).

It's written in Python and you can add your own modules that check whatever you want. There are also some checks built-in, e.g. looking for package names by regex. Still very much in progress, but I've been using it successfully for a long time now.

Here's hoping someone else will find it useful.