Ran across this problem/feature “The following packages have been kept back:” when trying to update some of my Ubuntu servers. Typically this means there is some kind of dependency issue(s) with the listed packages. For me I had the package “open-vm-tools” installed and it was causing a dependency conflict with the listed packages.
 
So how do you tell apt-get to ignore the “conflict(s)” and proceed anyways. Well you have two options available,
 
Option one: manually upgrade the individual package
 
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sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools
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Option two(recommended method): tell apt-get to intelligently handle updating the dependencies with new versions of packages
 
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sudo apt-get -s dist-upgrade
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Either option works but instead of having to update each package individually, I personally like letting the apt-get do the work!