I just moved from Mint 17.3 to UM 16.04.1 Other than a few minor niggles I was able to figure out, it's been a great experience. A question I have though:
Software Updater says my system is up-to-date, however when I run apt list --upgradable in Terminal, I get the following results:
I asked basically the same thing a while back about Synaptic which behaves the same as apt:
It's not like Mint which usually has an upgrade to the Updater that is done by itself first, before other updates. It's like the Updater code has to first get ready to handle the pending updates.
Instead, Ubuntu (and -Mate) has a combination of extra roll-out protection and bandwidth staggering on non-critical upgrades. You should never see this difference on critical or security updates.
Kept back updates could be the result of an application you installed has an update available but one of its dependencies has not been upgraded yet. So the applications will not be upgraded until the dependencies are.
Well, that should now be clear. No?
Ok, an example: Gimp. Let’s say there is a new version available and it depends on the latest version of libwmf. Even better, without the latest version of libwmf Gimp simply won’t work. This means that libwmf has to be updated before Gimp can. So Gimp will be kept back until libwmf is upgraded.