When checking for updates if there are dist-upgraded available you will get notified in the virtualmin console however you will be unable to complete those updates from the console. It is not actually clear that there are pending dist-upgrades.
Since dist-upgrade also handles changing dependencies with the latest versions of the package, intelligently resolves the conflict among package dependencies and tries to upgrade the most significant packages at the expense of less significant ones, if required, perhaps it should be the default upgrade method on apt systems? or at least have the option to run a dist-upgrade from the gui.
dist-upgrade can be pretty dramatic, allowing removal of packages to resolve conflicts/dependencies, which potentially means it can break things, maybe in serious ways. It’s a rare event, but any time an update initiated in Virtualmin breaks anything, we catch the blame, even though we have no control over the packages coming from the vendor.
So, it was an intentional decision in the past to not offer a dist-upgrade from the GUI for that reason…we want people to be unafraid of running updates in the GUI, because it’s so dangerous to run old software. There is no way to guarantee something won’t break if it performs a dist-upgrade. Historically, we only listed updates that were relevant to Virtualmin, which would (probably) never end up in this situation…so, the decision was made before it was really an issue, so may be worth revisiting.
I don’t have great answers for how best to solve the sort of weird feel to the UI, where updates appear available but the UI can’t install them. I hate that Ubuntu/Debian sometimes have sloppy upgrade transitions between packages.
At the very least, if we were to make a dist-upgrade possible from the UI, it would need to be a separate thing, like a checkbox or something. It really shouldn’t be the default update method for all updates, I don’t think.