Email from customer:

Hi Ross,

I am still having a tonne of fun with Linux and am learning new and interesting stuff everyday. Although everyone said it was a big learning curve I haven’t found it to be a lot of trouble. There was one questions though.

I am doing regular updates because I like to keep my system up to date always with regular updates and upgrades and I use three main commands, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade, but I really don’t know the difference between the lot of them.

If you could please advise, Jemma.

Hey Jemma, I really hope you don’t mind me answering your questions and making a post about it at the same time. Maybe a few of our other Linux users as well were thinking the same thing.

Linux is an awesome free operating system and two of the most popular based on the Debian distribution are Mint and Ubuntu.

It’s always good to keep your system up-to-date.

Updating and Upgrading your computer usually ensures you have the latest security, operating system and software packages to make your computer run smoothly.

Most of the time these updates work great, and I highly recommend them. But they are not perfect, and sometimes they do the opposite.

When updating your computer its always a good idea to know what you are doing and what you are updating.

Here are the main updating commands for Ubuntu and Linux, which are not the only Linux flavours around, but probably two of the most popular.

apt-get update

When you want to upgrade all the packages on your computer, your operating system has to know what to update and where to get it from.

The apt-get update command in your terminal will go out and basically get you the latest list of packages you use on your computer in preparation for you to install them.

This does not actually upgrade your software on your computer. Its just updates your list.

apt-get upgrade

Ok, so now you have update your list of available packages and you want to go ahead and install them.

The sudo apt-get upgrade command will do exactly this. When you type this command it will take a look at the list, let you know what packages can be upgraded and before doing it prompt you to continue “yes/no”.

Typing “y” will continue the upgrade and you will see the status downloading and upgrading your packages on your computer.

Once its finished you will see it in your terminal and you will not have to restart your computer.

apt-get dist-upgrade

There isn’t a huge difference between apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade but there is one.

The dist-upgrade command will still upgrade your packages but for example if the packages are reliant on other dependencies, dist-upgrade is a little bit smarter and will also install the necessary dependencies to allow that package to install and run correctly.