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I assume you want to minimize the amount of building released packages from source, but also want to have well tested software and new features and modern hardware support, so 16.04 + kinetic may be too new for you, and 12.04 + hydro is falling off the end of life so is too old.
If you plan to buy a new motherboard next year with next year's cpu architecture it may only be properly supported by 16.04, which forces you to use kinetic, but jade or indigo is more stable if you can go to an older ubuntu.
Upgrading isn't a huge issue though either hydro onward, just going one version forward (or backward if necessary) shouldn't be too hard.
From each wiki.ros.org/xxxx/Installation/Ubuntu page where xxxx is the ros version name:
kinetic: 15.10, 16.04
jade: 14.04, 14.10, 15.04
indigo: 13.10, 14.04
hydro: 12.04, 12.10, 13.04
groovy: 11.10, 12.04, 12.10
fuerte: 10.04, 11.10, 12.04
electric: 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10
diamondback: 10.04, 10.10, 11.04
cturtle: 9.04, 9.10, 10.04, 10.10
The official target platforms are listed in REP 3: http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0003.html
Asked: 2016-05-07 06:03:14 -0500
Seen: 5,432 times
Last updated: May 07 '16
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since currently ros kinetic kame is still in development and indio will be supported for the next two years I would definitely go for 14.04.X because this version has the most prebuild packages you can download via apt-get.