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I watch Ubuntu's recent steps with trepidation. I love using it for a home Linux machine (indeed upgrading just to LTS-es), and I could not care less about its "convergence" aspirations. I don't want Ubuntu on my phone or my tablet, or at least I don't care.

I worry that eventually its mobile plans will bury the desktop Ubuntu, move it out of focus, so to say. When that happens, I wonder whither I should turn. Debian?

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I used to use Debian, and I'm not sure I'd go back. On one hand, the stability was wonderful (Debian was pretty much bulletproof for me), but packages were, for stable, quite old. Hardware compatibility isn't quite as good: hardware (including a USB Wi-Fi dongle) that Ubuntu autodetects and has no trouble with became an adventure to get working.

I tracked stable, so maybe testing would be better in terms of package outdating, but hardware compatibility is Debian's achilles heel right now.

Depending on what you do with your machine(s), it might make sense for you to go with whatever versions come with the vast majority of the packages, but for the few that matter to you, manage them yourself. For example, I use Oracle's Virtualbox PPA, and it just updated as a normal software update last night. That's 4.2.x, compared to Ubuntu's 4.1.x. For things that aren't PPA'd, you'd need to pay closer attention. It's an option.

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