In virtually every installation of Debian -or derivative- it will happen that at some point during software management one will be prompted this message: The following packages have been kept back Let’s provide an example to make it clear.
Example
First, you ran:
apt-get update
and everything was fine. We can affirm the command reported a 0 exit code.
After this you ran:
sudo apt-get upgrade
if your OS‘ software gets updated often and if it is updated at the time of running the upgrade command the output will be like this:
iamsysadmin@examplehost:~$ 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: cinnamon-screensaver 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
… and there is the weird message: The following packages have been kept back.