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.