Create your own base box that might have a typical stack you always use. Treat this like your gold image and you can use it for trying out new technologies without installing on your host machine as well as a different VM for every project or even forks of a project if you want.

Vagrant's docs are pretty decent on how to create a custom box.

Use a box that matches the production environment for each specific project.

When possible I use boxcutter released boxes, as they generally have good support for providers besides virtual box.

So e.g. on new projects, I use one of the boxcutter Debian boxes, but for a client I have with a legacy environment, I'm using a centos box.

ubuntu/trusty64 is the most popular box and is officially supported (whatever that means). Just install anything you need with apt-get - you can do it during the provisioning step on first run.