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

[Colin Law]

On Fri, 19 Sept 2025 at 09:38, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 19 Sep 2025 08:24:13 +0100, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Fri, 19 Sept 2025 at 08:10, Little Girl <littlergirl at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
> >> * Upgrade the entire system to a newer release.
> >
> >Sorry, that is wrong, it is do-release-upgrade that upgrades the os to
> >a new release.
> >
> >apt-get dist-upgrade is virtually the same as apt full-upgrade, but
> >uses the newer apt command rather than the old apt-get.
> >
>
> So does this mean:
> if you are on say Ubuntu server 22.04.3 LTS and want to get the new 24.04
> release like Ubuntu server 24.04.1 LTS then (as seems to be offered when logging
> on and is available):
>
> sudo apt update
> sudo apt full-upgrade
> reboot
> sudo do-release-upgrade
>
> which gets you the latest release.

Yes

>
> So it still remains to be explained what this does:
>
> sudo apt-get dist-upgrade  (Why use apt-get these days when apt is available?)
> Surely it does not get from one major release to the next?
>
> I believe it just refreshes the current installation's release to the latest
> state say from 22.04.2 LTS to 22.04.3 LTS but *not* to 24.04.1

Not necessarily. It does basically the same as apt full-upgrade, which
is to install the latest versions of all installed (via apt) packages.
If you have 22.04.2 then it will not necessarily get you to exactly
the same as 22.04.3, but generally near enough to be the same thing.

Colin L