Well, sometimes you need to dist-upgrade, even when not switching distros.

How would you know when?

Some packages will be held back by apt-get until you "dist-upgrade" them and apt-get will notify you of the held back packages when you apt get "upgrade".

If you get a lot of packages that it tries to uninstall. That's basically what dist-upgrade does: tries to uninstall the least number of packages to allow the update through.

It never happens with a point release though - they are careful about that.

dist-upgrade does not mean distribution upgrade, it just handles additional dependencies after an upgrade and it may remove some packages if necessary.

This is not Ubuntu.

Better use 'aptitude':

  sudo aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade

Huh? I've been using apt-get on Debian since it was first released (in 1998).

Why is it better to use aptitude on debian?

I've been using debian for years and always just used apt-get.

For a start, aptitudes command line options are less confusing and more powerful.

Furthermore:

http://superuser.com/questions/93437/aptitude-vs-apt-get-whi...

There doesn't seem to be anything that jumps out as a reason to use aptitude over apt-get there. It mentions that the defaults for upgrading the distro are better for aptitude but doesn't say why or what differences there are.

I can see the search being useful though.

Seeing as my muscle memory is set at apt-get, i'll stick with it for the moment.

There was a brief time when aptitude was smarter than apt-get (it was smart enough to remove auto-installed dependencies when you removed a package, for example). During that time, the advice was to use aptitude instead of apt-get.

Those smarts were later moved to apt itself, but it's still a part of the folklore.

There isn't any specific reason, really. It's a matter of preference, and they can be used interchangeably (which wasn't always the case) nowadays.