People doing the 30 days linux Challenge are having several problems because of Mint's old packages and technology. Why people still recommend it when there is Fedora and Opensuse with KDE and Gnome?
I'm generally in the same boat. I don't think of Mint's packages as "old", but "stable". I've had a few cases where I want the latest features, and there are easy ways to get new versions. Dialing down instability isn't so easy.