[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Dennis, on PCs I am a tool user, not a tool builder. (I do <that> professionally on the mainframe).

I began on mainframes too. I suspect that colors your approach to Linux.

With Linux Mint, there is a lot of "mothballing" for beginners (like me). You can go to the menu, select software manager and select a package for download, and it will install like a windows installer app. No terminal commands required. However, the download software looks for particular repositories kept by the Mint organization. (All mothballed away from the user's eye.) Those Mint org repositories go away when the support term ends for that particular release.

They don't, really. You just have to add them to the places your package manager can look.

Now you can "get under the hood" and redirect the repository name (if you have a copy) and have the "mothballing" software to load from the new name. Or you can "open the hood" and get things with the terminal command.

Yes you can, and I have done so on occasion with Ubuntu.

Am I getting the most out of Linux? Absolutely not! But one of the "rules" of Linux has always been - you can run any release you like, no matter how old. So I <don't> upgrade a working, stable, system to a new release (I do upgrade patches to the release on the "dirty" (internet) box, but not the sterile box). 'Til death of the hardware do we part. . .

The only times I have seen problems with releases were hardware related.

One was the old netbook I mentioned earlier, where a new release of Ubuntu had a new kernel that needed PAE support my machine did not have. The new kernel failed to install, and things went to hell in a bucket on reboot.

Another instance happened at an employer. I got tasked to order more of the 1u Dell rackmount servers that were our standard, install them in our colocation facility, and get them configures and running. The problem was that the previous servers we had used Perq 5 controllers. The new ones used Perq 6 models. Our standard OS was Centos 4.5, which did not support the Perq 6. CentOS 4.5 would not see the installed drives when I tried to install it. Dell support said I needed at least CentOS 4.6, so I downloaded it to install. I called my boss to tell him about it. He wasn't happy, but recognized he was stuck with it, and we really had to go to a newer release of CentOS. (He was another chap who believed in staying behind the curve in OS releases.)

Save for hardware incompatibilities, I don't recall ever seeing an app not run on an older Linux version. It may well occur, but in general, Linux apps use a base set of OS functions that are likely to be there across versions. The bigger issue will be having the required library versions, but Ubuntu (and Mint) do a good job of tracking dependencies and adding any you don't have to the download when you install an application.

It's not like Windows, where new releases add new things to the API that programs look for, and a current program may not successfully install and run on an older Windows version because it is looking for API stuff that doesn't exist on the older version.

I have an old machine that has Win2K Pro, and various things I have need at least XP and won't run on it. I have another machine with XP Home, and various other things I have want at least Win7 because of newer added APIs. There are reasons why I keep current on OS releases, and one use of Linux here is a mid-life kicker for old hardware that won't run a current Windows version, but will run a recent flavor of Linux.

Blossom, like myself, just wants a working, easy to use, replacement for WIN 10. Linux Mint does the job, I'd just thought I would point out some of the quirks (for minimal users).

Those quirks are unlikely to bite Blossom. Her use cases shouldn't encounter them.
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Dennis