I still like the purer Gnome experience that comes with Debian, but since Ubuntu works out of the box with my laptop's wireless card, I just use the Ubuntu 12.0

I still like the purer Gnome experience that comes with Debian, but since Ubuntu works out of the box with my laptop's wireless card, I just use the Ubuntu 12.04 "mini.iso" and pick the "gnome" metapackage during install. The only real difference then between the resulting environment vs. Debian is that Ubuntu have somehow coupled Unity with Gnome, such that you still get booted into a stripped down version of the Unity shell. But if you log out and back into Gnome, there's practically no difference between Ubuntu LTS/Debian Testing.