Should I upgrade my Macbook Air late 2010 to 10.11?

Question

macOS

I have been sitting on an old Macbook Air Late 2010 on an old Snow Leopard - Mac OS 10.6.8 for a long time. While performing its tasks - simple tasks in xcode, youtube without lags (only on safari), lightroom (there are freezes on processing raw files), movies in 1080p (only in the vlc player, in the rest the sound of the video goes at a slower speed than the sound) .
New OSes are already more convenient - imessage in the laptop, more beautiful, new programs are not supported on 10.6.8. A logical question arose - is it worth upgrading to El Capitan? What will be the battery life in this case (now it keeps ok, although it is 5 years old), will it start slower work in xcode, lightroom and photoshop'e? It seems like in El Capitan they promise a performance increase (but there compared to 10.8), but the reviews in the AppStore are 3.5 stars.

Answer 1

I'm using a MacBook "Core 2 Duo" 2.0" (Unibody) from 2008. With 4 GB of memory it was quite comfortable to use OS X 10.9.5. After upgrading to El Capitan, I had to install an SSD.
In your case, you can safely upgrade to Mavericks without make a copy of Time Machine before doing this so that you can roll back to a previous version at any time.