Ubuntu may not be the flashiest distro out there (indeed, many Linux elitists look down on it as a distro for new users), but it's stable, reliable, and has great support, as it's both immensely popular and backed by a major corporation (Canonical). We'll be using the Long Term Support (LTS) branch of Ubuntu, as it gets extra support from Canonical - the latest version, 18.04 (because it was released in April 2018) is supported until April 2028. All CSL Linux servers have been running Ubuntu since a reinstall in 2017.