I also abandoned Ubuntu, and after various adventures in distro land I now use Debian Testing with Xfce.
I used Debian and it seems to be gaining detractors from Ubuntu, my only question is... what made you switch and sick with Debian?
The rough edges I've found: no automatic updater or security updates in testing, just run apt update/upgrade once a day. An initial problem with the video driver not working because it requires non-free firmware, solution is just to add Debian non-free (it would have been helpful if a warning was given during installation). Firefox/thunderbird still on an old long-term-service release: I've been installing tarballs manually for now.