When a new kernel is installed with dist-upgrade thats not a new release of Ubuntu.

Dist-upgrade vs upgrade. Or from Debian Buster to the next Debian release. Dist-upgrade will not upgrade to a new release unless sourceslist has been modified accordingly and even then thats not a supported way to upgrade in Ubuntu. The difference between apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade has been both well-known and well-established by now ie.

Software packages with newer versions are upgraded and none whatsoever are removed. Apt upgrade can then act on this information and upgrade all installed packages to their latest versions. It updates existing packages installs new dependencies that are not in the system and deletes those that are not needed.

Upgrade installsupgrades while dist-upgrade is capable of installremoveupgrade if package removal happens to be necessary for either an installation or upgrading of another package. This command will only upgrade packages that are. Jack Wallen demystifies the thre.

In the latter some newer packages are installed and some are removed to satisfy certain dependencies. Apt update gets an up to date list of packages that can be installed or updated apt upgrade updates packages it can but never removes packages apt full-upgrade updates packages more aggressively removing packages that block other updates apt-get dist-upgrade an. The original purpose of dist-upgrade is to migrate between releases of Debian roughly equivalent to Ubuntus do-release-upgrade So there is a bit less protection from unanticipated consequences.

Dist-upgrade command is very similar to upgrade command. This command will upgrade too but during the upgrade there will be some prompts related to package configuration. Furthermore the claim or GRUB update is required is false.

Sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. In order to upgrade the packages run the dist-upgrade command with sudo privileges. The command upgrade keeps a package at its installed obsolete version if upgrading would need an extra package to be installed for a new dependency to be satisfied.