Taking on custom installs of kernels, IMO, defeats the purpose of sticking to LTS flavor of Ubuntu.

I have limited interest for self-managing installed packages through terminal, and while I don't mind following terminal-based install instructions, I only go there to fix something or get some feature I really need.

For now, I plan to run my VM with 12.04 LTS with last working kernel version.  When Ubuntu decides to push current 12.04 LTS users to 14.04 LTS, I'll do a full backup and try the new LTS version.  May try a fresh 14.04 install and migrate my data if I can find a good tutorial.

I shall miss the times when I didn't worry about doing full backups of my 30GB VM before installing the regularly-pushed updates (Player doesn't support snapshots!).   Ignorance was bliss.