Even though I use ubuntu on my desktop, it is from Debian, and I ran Debian on my servers for years. Debian is the most important software for me for decades. For that I thank you, Riku, and everybody else contributes to Debian!
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.
Are there specific things you had issues with? Debian Testing still feels more stable and as feature-filled as Ubuntu Xenial to me.
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.