Ubuntu has lots of releases, so you don't need to sit on a broken piece of techn...

Ubuntu has lots of releases, so you don't need to sit on a broken piece of technology for ages. Oh and there is no gnome-shell in Debian stable.

Imho using an Ubuntu release is gradually easier than following Debian testing.

And Ubuntu is security hardened. Take a look at this list, Apparmor, stack protection, (more) secure sysctl settings: