apt upgrade full-upgrade or dist-upgrade, what to use?

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Bo Berglund wrote:

>About a year ago I changed my habits to use:
>
>sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
>
>but now I see in a post here use of dist-upgrade and I don't know
>the difference between them (are there still other variations?).

Here are the notes I keep on those in my personal wiki:

====================
sudo apt update
* Fetch and update the local list of packages from your current
  release's software repository (and third-party repositories if you
  use them) to ensure that your system's information about new and
  updated packages (your package index) is current without actually
  downloading or installing any packages.

sudo apt full-upgrade
* Upgrade all outdated packages that are installed in your current
  release and use smart conflict-resolution to remove
  currently-installed packages or add new dependencies if needed when
  intelligently handling changing dependencies with new versions of
  packages.

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
* Upgrade the entire system to a newer release.
====================

There are lots of other variations or at least other possibilities
that one can run.

My approach is this:

1. I run these commands:

sudo apt update
* See above.

sudo apt full-upgrade
* See above.

sudo snap refresh
* Update (refresh) all Snaps.

2. I reboot if needed and then run these commands:

sudo apt autoremove --purge
* Remove orphaned packages (that are no longer needed) from the local
  repository and purge their configuration files.

sudo apt clean
* Remove all packages from the local repository, but do not remove
  the lock file from the /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/ directory
  and from the /var/cache/apt/archives/ directory.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.