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Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

It looks like my kernel updates are being held back:

    ~ $ sudo apt-get upgrade
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information... Done
    Calculating upgrade... Done
    The following packages have been kept back:
      ffmpeg libva1 linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic
    0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded.

The newest available version of linux-image-generic according to apt-cache showpkg is 3.13.0.100.108. (I'm running 3.13.0.98 right now.) Maybe 3.13.100 has the fix to this bug, but I'll have to figure out what's keeping back linux-kernel-image from being updated.

What's really puzzling though is that I should have kernle 4.4.x, since I'm running Ubuntu 14.04.5, according to the Ubuntu Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Support#A14.04.x_Ubuntu_Kerne... It's strange that my Kubuntu installation is frozen on 3.13.x.

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Note the "HWE" (hardware enablement) on that chart. Ubuntu 14.04 came with 3.13; if you want a 4.4 kernel, you have to install linux-generic-lts-xenial.

Thanks, that answers my question! Installing linux-generic-lts-xenial should let me get the 4.4.x kernel on Ubuntu 14.04.

I might still switch to Arch Linux. It's been a hassle to get the latest releases of various packages (like python, gcc, etc). I've had to use third-party PPAs or manually install them. Ubuntu's freezing of packages makes it great as a base image for Docker containers and other reliably reproducible deployment scenarios, but that's not so great as a regular desktop user.

I have been using Antergos (Desktop friendly Arch) on and off for a while. If you haven't updated for a while, it could cause problems. After I updated after staying off it for two months I had an x crash. Restarted, no problems, all updates installed.

Chris from LAS does say I believe in User Error 6 or 7 that if you don't update Arch in a while you could have stability issues when you update.

I strongly recommend Arch, we'd be glad to have you.

..because you don't know the difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade.

use dist-upgrade or just explicitly install those packages.

No, dist-upgrade would be 14.04 -> 16.04.

I don't want 16.04; I want to stay on 14.04.

> No, dist-upgrade would be 14.04 -> 16.04.

That is a reasonable assumption, but it is incorrect. Check the man page for apt-get.

On Ubuntu systems, the command to upgrade to a new release is "do-release-upgrade". Insanity, but there it is.

Sorry, instead of "upgrade" I should have typed `full-upgrade` (which is the same thing as `dist-upgrade` and is unrelated to moving major distro versions)

This is indeed a point of confusion. dist-upgrade basically allows adding new packages, or removal of old packages. upgrade does not, this includes the versioned kernel packages. I suspect (possibly unfoundedly) that the command was originally named because this generally happened when doing such distrubution upgrades, but it's not what it actually does.

If you're always reviewing it manually it's ok to just use dist-upgrade, alternative if you want to install new packages but still not let it remove packages, you can use: sudo apt-get upgrade --with-new-pkgs

Personally I always just use dist-upgrade and it's not a problem as long as you check it before you hit go.

Most of my 16.04 instances that are configured to auto-update have installed the new kernel already.

I've set up cron jobs in the past which automatically ran apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, but it's sometimes caused things to unpredictably break, especially when you have the backports PPA.

After things randomly broke 3 times I decided not to add the backports PPA, and to do manual updates every now and then.

Set up the `unattended-upgrades` to only install security updates, blindly apt-upgrading can lead to unintended consequences; this will let you get security upgrades without breaking 3rd party packages.

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