No, I don’t think so – mamba update --all updates all the packages in current environment – if you haven’t activated anything, that would be the base environment.
yes. You can accomplish the same thing with:
conda activate sage
conda (or mamba) update --all
[*]
To be clear: conda (and mamba) are all about environments. As a rule, you don’t want to use the base environment for anything other than running the system.
So: If you want to update (or add to , or …) your sage environment – then activate it and do your updating there. If you want to update the minforge system, THEN you update the base environment.
So you’ve done the right thing by creating a “sage” environment in which to run sage. If that’s mostly what you do – you may want to set up your system to automatically active the sage environment when you log in – then it will be ready to go, and you won’t accidentally mess with the base environment by accident.
HTH,
-CHB
[*] I’m pretty sure that miniforge is set up with conda using the “mamba solver” – and the faster solver is really the advantage of mamba over conda – so when I use miniforge, I just use plain old conda.