Seeing "The following packages have been kept back" Error while updating your system? Here's how to handle this error in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

I’m on Debian 12. I did an upgrade today and got a message that pipewire-audio had been kept back. A few weeks ago I did a:

sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports pipewire

Which pulled in the newer version of pipewire so I could resolve an issue.

So I searched for ‘apt kept back’ and found the above article. I wanted to share it for anyone else in the future hitting something like this.

My solution is just to do nothing. Debian 13 should only be a few months away at this point and when I attempt to run an update only for pipewire-audio it indicates that I need to update wireplumber. I don’t really want to go down the dependency hole at this time, so just going to let it chill.

  • Cyborganism@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    I dunno. Sounds like a repo-specific thing. OP is on Debian 12 and what I’m understanding is they’re also seeing this message for a third party repo.