apt-get holds back upgrading from 20.04.1 to 20.04.2

Solution 1:

The issue is a subtle one. sudo apt-get upgrade and sudo apt upgrade differ slightly in semantics. The plain 'apt' is designed to be human-friendly, and so it takes some actions not explicitly instructed to it: the notable one here is that it will install new packages. apt-get upgrade doesn't: it will only upgrade packages that are already installed. The equivalent for scripts would be apt-get safe-upgrade.

In other words, packages that are held back by sudo apt-get upgrade but not by sudo apt upgrade probably added new dependencies, which must be installed.

As for the scrollback problem, user535733 is incorrect: it is a kernel change. More details can be found in this LWN article's comment section: in short, the ability to scroll back in a console is a mess for the kernel, and it was removed due to a perceived lack of need. Without interested maintainers, kernel features tend to be removed: if you need it, I would suggest tweaking the login shell to one that supports scrollback, or else being willing to commit time and/or money to reintroducing the feature.