Simply Amazing

[Pierre]

so - - I've got a few re-cycled Laptops,
that started life as Vista Business Edition,
or at least until they got to an auction, where I've found 'em.

then they all got LM9 LTS stuck on them,
( ok - LM9 had been out, maybe 18 months )
and then they all slowly got upgraded:
- LM9 - LM13 - LM17

looking them over, a couple had been upgraded, maybe last year, and had:
- Mepis MX14 / Linux Mint 13
- Mepis MX14 / Linux Mint 17

so - - grabbed the first one, checked that nothing of value, data wise, was on it.
and installed Mepis MX15 / LM 18 onto it's HDD.

and - - just One Hour later - - the upgrade was finished

Simply Amazing
- both systems are that good

interestingly enough:
- - Mepis MX 15 needed 140Mb of updates
- - Linux Mint 18 needed 350Mb of updates.

so - - encouraged - - pulled out another Laptop,
which still had LM9 installed onto it's HDD:
& upgraded that one two - whilst preserving the /home partition,
as there is lots of data in it's /home.
- that upgrade went very well all data was kept & the user-name was re-used A.ok.

Simply Amazing

[thom_A]

I didn't know there are still some who use Mepis, which was one of the distros I was circling around years ago aside from Kubuntu when I had plenty of time in my hands. But nowadays I just go with the most popular, which is Linux Mint. I go where most people gather around. It's where huge development and effort to make things right happen. Now most popular doesn't mean it fits your personal preferences. Preferences, of course, mean different things to different people. To me it may also mean plenty of tech support online when you need them, ie, forum, google searches, etc.

[Condorman]

Installed Mint 18 myself the other day. I'd been using Mint 17.x for two years, which was the longest I'd ever used any Linux, and it had been largely flawless. Mint 18 is up and running beautifully and I'm thrilled with it. Brilliant release.

[benali72]

I often work with old computers. What I like about Mint is it makes a minimal-effort upgrade strategy so easy. I just upgrade to a the latest LTS version every 5 years or so when the installed LTS version finally loses support. Finally you reach a point where either the hardware has finally conked out, or you realize you better just keep the old version on the machine because it's so outdated it can't run a new version. Altogether, a fine, easy strategy that keeps older hardware in service.

Contrast this to my relative who was upgraded from Win 7 to 10 -- he claims he checked NO on the upgrade pop-up but it went ahead anyway. In any case, the upgrade failed and rolled him back. But NOT to his initial state, rather to the state (patch level) of what the vendor feels people should be running for Win 7. This broke his Quickbooks and he had to run out and buy a new version for about $200. Needless to say, he's not too enthused about his vendor's upgrade strategy

[Goz]

Ages ago, Mepis was my go-to distro major big time...
I heard it died and was resurrected under a new name.