I’m not sure. Is there a reason it wouldn’t be safe? It’s fine on Raspbian but I’ve never used Ubuntu MATE on a Pi, so maybe there’s a specific reason not to do it that I’m unaware of?
In doubt, run the dist-upgrade command without the -y option that you used in your original command and you’ll see the list of packages that will be installed/updated before being asked to confirm (or cancel).
But if the current versions of your packages can’t be updated because of new dependancies, you won’t be able to do it with a simple apt-get upgrade.
I think that I read somewhere before that because of a Pi’s specific hardware a dist-upgrade could mess things up. I’ll have to research it more. Thanks for the suggestion.
That’s a bit weird. Maybe you saw advice not to use dist-upgrade because it updates every package that can be, including new versions of the kernel when available?