Why not debian? You get both the stable release supported for years to come and lots of packages. In my experience most of the needed apps are in the repository and don't need hunting down on third-party sites like with centos/rhel. On top of that you don't get silly things like ancient kernel with hundreds of patches which makes it incompatible with almost anything you need to compile as a module (depends on your hardware of course)
Seconded: if you're still on 8.04 and don't like how fast Ubuntu moves, then it sounds like you were born for Debian Stable, which is in many respects a very similar system
