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If I run:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

It upgrades all the packages on my system, including LibreOffice, Chrome & Firefox, which for me is undesirable.

How can I tell Ubuntu to only install system patches, whilst allowing me to manually upgrade my applications?

I am using Ubuntu 14.04 x64

You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
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  • What do you call "system patches"? You can select packages to upgrade. You can also set selected packages to be held too. – Pilot6 Jun 12 '16 at 10:57
  • @Pilot6 - Security updates, updates to system libraries like the MP4 codecs... Basically everything it normally upgrades except for user applications. – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit Jun 12 '16 at 11:00
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    That is not a good idea. User applications may depend on specific versions of other packages. For your purpose I would suggest to hold some packages you do not want to upgrade. But I would not recommend doing it though. – Pilot6 Jun 12 '16 at 11:03
  • @JonasCz - I don't think so because I don't use Synaptic – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit Jun 12 '16 at 11:28
  • I think the answers, esp. regarding "holding" also apply if you don't use synaptic. – Jonas Czech Jun 12 '16 at 11:29

1 Answers1

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You could try the following command

sudo apt-mark hold <package_name>

This will prevent it from being updated when running the usual upgrade command (sudo apt-get upgrade). It should also work in your case. To undo this you can run 

sudo apt-mark unhold <package_name>

It probably isnt a good idea to prevent packages from updating. New updates could include security fixes or bug fixes. Preventing these upgrades could be harmful for you system. Also as Pilot6 said in the comments, not upgrading the packages could prevent the applications from working altogethor. so be cautious when you decide to hold packages from upgrades.

Rumesh
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  • Thanks. I realize I didn't put this in the initial question, but any way to do that through Software Center? – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit Jun 12 '16 at 12:12
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    Not really sure, I stopped using software center and stuck to apt-get a long time back, since its a lot faster (atleast on my laptop) – Rumesh Jun 12 '16 at 13:26
  • @AndroidDev Software Center is buggy and not really maintained, so apt on the command line is better – cat Jun 12 '16 at 18:56
  • In fact the software center was replaced in 16.04 – Rumesh Jun 13 '16 at 05:38
  • Synaptic, which is a more sophisticated package-manager would offer this. It offers than also a list of packages beeing held. You cannot even seletively install a package from "proposed" with a software-center to confirm it fixes a bug. that's my impression. But Synaptic is co-installable. So far I have not yet met a person who has all counter-parts of given options for command-line at hand. – ellisistfroh Jun 28 '16 at 11:52