I was really surprise by the recommendation to use "uv tree --outdated --depth 1" to list outdated deps.

I personally use "uv pip list --outdated" since it has been introduced.

I agree that this is such an important command that it deserves its own top-level subcommand, though.

Author here. It wasn't a recommendation, it was just the only way I knew how to. "uv pip list --outdated" indeed has much better output, thanks!

Though this makes me wonder why are there 2 ways of viewing outdated packages, with wildly different output? The UX is mess...

Cause the "uv pip" entry point is designed to be backwards compatible with regular pip: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/pip/

"uv tree -od1" probably works. But yes, critique of pacman and other managers was that it needed to offer human sounding commands for frequent commands, like apt does.