I'm planning to do an OS upgrade on the server this weekend (from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04). Hopefully nothing will go wrong but there will be some downtime.

Out of curiosity, why 14.04 and not 16.04?  The latter just came out but is an LTS release also.

Probably cuz 14.04 is the last sane LTS of Ubuntu before the attempts to Gnome-ify everything? Go for it, dude.

I would assume you'd be safe using Ubuntu Server, though. That's without any DE.

Don't tell me your server has a GUI? Just run Ubuntu 16 Server.

Probably cuz 14.04 is the last sane LTS of Ubuntu before the attempts to Gnome-ify everything?

Ugh, I see what you mean.  Installed 16.04 on the VM I use for minisphere releases, and I already want 15.10 back.  gedit in particular was castrated--I feel like I'm using a crappy Android tablet instead of a PC.  It doesn't even remember anymore when you change tab size, word wrap etc.  What the hell kind of text editor turns word wrap on by default anyway?!

I feel kinda glad to be running Xubuntu now. Almost nothing seems to have changed here, other than the obvious fact that things have been updated.

What the hell kind of text editor turns word wrap on by default anyway?!

The same thing happened a few years ago to pico's GNU-itized variant, nano. They somehow decided that if you wanted to edit code, go use vi(m) or emacs. Any other editor must be a word processor for actual writing.

And people wonder why I still try to get real pico instead of nano.

If anyone's wondering I eventually got around to completing this upgrade this week after it ended up in an inconsistent state. Not fun having aptitude run out of memory resolving dependencies.

Probably cuz 14.04 is the last sane LTS of Ubuntu before the attempts to Gnome-ify everything? Go for it, dude.

14.04 is the latest my VPS provider offers. No, there's no GUI