You're not supposed to run apt upgrade in Proxmox at all, it may even break your system. Use dist-upgrade.
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#system_software_updates
this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
103 points (94.0% liked)
Selfhosted
56957 readers
675 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
dist-upgrade and full-upgrade are essentially the same command but yeah, I won't be using apt upgrade again in the future! Like I said in my post, the joys of being self taught is that you learn by my making mistakes and that's part of the "fun" 🤣
Nah, the fun is learning form others mistakes. Thanks for a fun read :}
Not essentially, exactly. One is a deprecated alias for the other.
Which one is which?
I thought full-upgrade replaced dist-upgrade that could make you think you're upgrading you distro to the next version
But now I'm not sure anymore.
Correct. Full-upgrade is the new term. It's an alias, though, so using either will accomplish the same thing.
dist-upgrade was used with apt-get
full-upgrade is used for apt
Just don’t use any command in proxmox. Proxmox is designed GUI first. It got an update button in the GUI. Only major releases could need tinkering in the terminal. But even changing repos is now possible in the GUI.
Gets annoying soon if you have more than one host. Easily automated with Ansible
I mean, you could just use the proxmox UI for updates. Single point for all servers, just click in and hit update. It explicitly runs dist-upgrade already.
Hmm. Welp. Let’s try. See what happens.
The nice thing about zypper is the various patch options and reporting. Gives you a good picture of what CVEs, rating, and if installed, needed, not needed etc. Does Apt have something similar?
I've seen that the patches are only available in the debian-security repository. It's important to review your repo list in /etc/apt/sources.list.d.
Proxmox does not use the standard debian kernel.
Yes, I referred to the Debian part only.
Ooof, scared me there for a second. Good thing I am using Dist-Upgrade in my ansible scripts.