Which distro to use is very much a matter of taste.
I have used debian for a long time, but never liked ubuntu.
I switched to fedora some time ago (two years or so).
You can work with all of them.
If you want more actual C::B, you can have alook at our nightlies threads in
http://forums.codeblocks.org/index.php/board,20.0.html.
Announced are windows builds, but in the answers you find links to linux nightlies for several distros.
If you use recent ubuntu or fedora you can use one of my repos (see my signature for links with more detailed instructions), I do not have mint (at the moment), but it might also work.
The official repos of the distros usually have older revisions of the official releases. That's one cause, why we always want to know the version-number of C::B.