Ubuntu 12.10 or 12.04 LTS

My first real Linux server is still running strong, and I've upgraded it over the years from Ubuntu 5.10 all the way to 12.04. When I first started out, I thought it'd be fun to always have the latest and greatest, but I quickly became tired of upgrades every six months. Upgrades can be a bit of a hassle and get boring after a few years, so unless there's something in 12.10 that you truly need, I'd stick with the LTS releases.

Some people absolutely hate upgrades and simply deploy a new Linode whenever they want to move to a new version of their OS. This requires you to reinstall programs, transfer over your data and configuration settings, etc., but it does keep things clean and tidy! So far, for me at least, upgrades every two years are not stressful enough that they warrant this approach.

The main reason to go with 12.10 would be if there are some new application features that you need that aren't in the LTS version. Even then, you could run 12.04 LTS and install backports of newer application versions if they are available.