Okay, so I am a bit scared of it. I love the idea of dist-upgrade, but am a little leary.

Any pros or cons on using it? I have in the past mostly just compiled new kernels from source and installed by hand in the event I needed a kernel upgrdade... Would using apt-get dist-upgrade be a nice way to upgrade to the latest fedora kernel release? (amongst other things).

also, I dont use kde or gnome anymore. just xfce. but i do use the occasional program from those distros (simple ones, eye of gnome, konqueror).

So, I don't know if i really need to upgrade the heavyweight environments for a couple of small things.
could i just do away with kde and gnome altogether (i think xfce has a wm i can use)...

just looking for any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, feedback, ridicule before i hit enter on dist-upgrade...

anything i should look out for as being a problem?

sorry for the scattered post...

All that command should do is to upgrade your packages to the latest ones held by the repositories. I can't see any huge problems arising, but it may well take a long time.

it should be fine. if you do a dist-upgrade, and if it's anything that will hurt your system critically, it will ask you to enter a long string, I can't remember what it says exactly. It's something like "This could be potentially harmful with the package selection. To do it anyways, enter "Yea, for you obey me!" or something of the like
pretty nifty