Anecdotally, I get notifications of maintenance outages every month with DO in NYC1 and NYC2. These are exceedingly, exceedingly rare with Linode's Atlanta DC.
Also, stolen CPU on my DO boxes is super high, whereas this is very rare on Linode. You have less neighbors.
My experience is the reverse. My $5 DO server running almost identical software responds much faster than my Linode server. The Linode server is far, far closer to me geographically.
I have put this down to the DO SSDs. It will be interesting to see if this is true. I've been considering migrating from Lindoe to DO because they were faster and cheaper.
I've had 2 DO VPS for about 6 months, and never had a problem with them.
Most of the notifications are about "short periods of higher latency and packet loss", which I can totally tolerate.
The last "5-10 minutes disconnect" happened in November 2013.
Packet loss is high latency when you are dealing with TCP. So unless you are streaming something over UDP or rely on ICMP for something like monitoring, you are fine.
I don't know about Linode, but I do know that DO does not report most of there outages on there status page.
With 3 out of 4 outages or 'troubles' at Digital Ocean, there is no report on there status page. Even when tens of people complaining about it on twitter and they replied on the tweets that they have an outage, there is nothing on the status page.
So I would not recommend comparing there status pages.
Also, stolen CPU on my DO boxes is super high, whereas this is very rare on Linode. You have less neighbors.