Re: Modified distro
Just use a "standard" deployment of LTS with specific packages,
Exactly! Unless your needs are very special, and you have immense technical talent at your disposal, do not even think about a making custom distro, or even basing your work on some less-known existing distro. Let Red Hat, Ubuntu or Suse deal with the base OS. (If on shoestring, just use CentOS. You essentially get the reliability and utterlly boring predictability of Red Hat Enterprise for free...).