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.

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.

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)