May I ask what you are missing from Debian as a desktop ?
I went from Ubuntu minimal to Debian (stable, nonetheless),tiling wm for me, gnome for friends and guests, and found Debian easier to maintain (for me and my friends whose computers I manage).
I must say I feel Debian's desktop experience is really top notch and crosses all the check marks of what a desktop is supposed to do (for me at least) and so I don't really see what is gained from switching from Debian to Ubuntu regarding desktop features.
> May I ask what you are missing from Debian as a desktop ?
When I switched, Debian was in the process of taking 3 years to go from woody to sarge. After that it would be another 5 before etch.
I'm sure Debian makes a fine desktop these days. I could definitely see switching back at some point.
I do like that there is someone who takes decisions Ubuntu; I think that streamlines things in some ways. Debian can get into pretty long and involved flames/discussions about things. Sometimes good comes of it, sometimes it just distracts people from putting out a good OS.
I went down the same path when Ubuntu's appearance suddenly made Debian look slow and outdated. Now I have been back on Debian for a few years and it just feels better - Debian has come a long way... I believe that Ubuntu's mere existence gave it a good jolt !
Yeah, a better release schedule helps. I recall Debian servers from 'back in the day' where you'd start accumulating all this stuff from unstable because you started needing something that wasn't 4 years old, and then it would have dependencies, and so on. It could get a bit messy.
>> May I ask what you are missing from Debian as a desktop ?
> When I switched, Debian was in the process of taking 3 years to go from woody to sarge. After that it would be another 5 before etch.
It's true that I remember being unable to properly manage my installed Debians at the time Ubuntu first came out and only fully committed to using Debian on desktop some months before Wheezy actually came out. So I was delighted to see modern packages when upgrading to wheezy.
One thing that's lacking is out-of-the-box audio. Granted, I do have to install Nvidia drivers to get competent video, however there are numerous guides for that, and it's not entirely necessary.
Audio, on the other hand, remains a mystery to me. It just didn't work and there was nowhere for me to turn for help.
By and large, I'm very happy with it, although I wish they'd sink a bit more time into avoiding regressions than trying to create new things.
I like the predictable release schedule, and the fact that it's a bit more focused than Debian.
Yet, underneath it's still all (almost at least) free software that I can hack on if needs be.
These days I use Xubuntu, with Xfce, because that's a bit more to my liking as a desktop: focus follows mouse is not something I care to do without.