Yes, I made the same move as you are contemplating, from 8.04 to Mint. Your pal
is right - Mint is based on Ubuntu 8.04. The main difference, apart from it's
own look and feel, is that many of the proprietary codecs that you have to
download with Ubuntu are already built-in.

I love Mint and have now made it my main OS, only occasionally booting into XP
for a couple of particular tasks that are less easily accomplished in Linux. Try
downloading Mint and running it from the live CD first to see if you like the
layout. It certainly suits me, though we are all different!

Good luck and let us know how you get on.

I am also a Linux Mint user and I also have a Puppy frugal
installation, just for the sake of speed. I am using Mint because I
like it.

I also used tinyME for the sake of speed but I wiped it out, as it de-logged
all the time and I had to re-login.

I will be attempting to download in a few days time (I keep
losing the server connection!) and give it a bash. I'm quite curious to
see the difference.

I'm running from Linux Mint live boot. It's defaulting to a start
menu that makes XP look well organized. Applications, places, and
system all open at the same time. I don't see an obvious way to
repair it back to separate applications, places, and system menus.
I'm sure there's an obvious fix. I just don't see it. What do I need
to do? Does the junk on the desk top (computer and mint's home icons)
disappear after a proper install? Will just deleting them lose any
functionality?

Returning to Mandriva until I can try a live boot with these items
repaired.

I will look back. It also lacks some apps installed in Ubuntu by default, like
xsane, f-spot and Gnome games and had to install them. I had to add the window
switcher and the workspace switcher to the panel and some more things, but still
I like it more.

With ubuntu 8.10, you can edit the menus. You can also create menus. I don't
know about Mint.

It's pretty and straight forward Ubuntu with frills, I have it on my
wife's computer (1.5MHz) which is used for every day simple tasks. I
think I'll leave it with the 8.04 (=Mint 5) LTS as it is solid. All I
have to do is the occasional update.