Old but gold: Here's a review of Xubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus running on an eight-year-old Asus eeePC netbook, covering long but successful upgrade process, reuse of programs and settings, applications, media playback and streaming, Samba access, printing, performance, responsiveness, multi-tasking, resource usage, hardware compatibility, amazing battery life, other observations, and more. Should be interesting. http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/eeepc-xerus.html Cheers, Mrk
Xenial Xerus offers periodic kernel upgrade but there is a third party kernel utility that allows you to update to the latest kernel, well beyond what Ubuntu offers. Ukuu Kernel Update Utility - a third party PPA from teejee-2008. The 2 point release fixed a lot of bugs. And there are still more point releases due until 2018 when a new LTS version comes out.
I'm sure MATE would run equally well on that ancient eeePC netbook. I didn't like the new Brisk menu offered for 17.04 - no preferences settings. I'd stick with the Linux Mint slab menu.
@Mrkvonic what about touchscreens implementation? i have a similar mini-laptop with touchscreen; in the past, it was quite "average"