Before I moved to Windows 10 I routinely had 150+ day uptimes. The old VMWare is rock solid and runs really fast.
Having to use an older version of xubuntu does kind of stink, but I'm pretty sure if you really cared you could use 16.04, but just downgrade xfce to use 14.04's version.
It's not something I bothered with because visually I'm happy with the way things look, using custom PPAs are easy and I use Docker for various programming language runtimes and services.
