What prevents you from using Debian on the desktop? I'm using Debian testing for quite a while already, and it works rather well. The only annoyance is the the freeze period, but it got shorter lately.
Too many software development environments are using ubuntu out-of-the-box these days, I thus follow that to save some setup time. If I use desktop for simply surfing or office needs then yes Debian will be my preference.
I never had such kind of problems when using Debian, but if you need to target a specific distro, you can always add a VM or chroot / container to target it. There is no need to replace the desktop OS to do it. Linux is quite good for such kind of thing.
