What should i expect switching from Ubuntu to Debian?

I’ve been a Ubuntu user for little more than a year now, i liked the system layout and implementation up to this latest version, problem was it was really buggy, but all the bugs were promised to disappear upon the arrival of the new LTS version, 10.4.

10.4 has arrived and it is undoubtably faster and better in some respects, however it bugs me to no end that the designers decided they could do whatever the fuck they wanted with the workspace we users have grown accustomed to, without any chance for us to decide wether we wanted to switch or not.

What happend is that they decided the notification area has to go.

Which would be fine if the job hadn’t been done only a for half and if this didn’t lead to having two separate applets running simultaneously only to have the internet connection monitor and volume control visible.

Furthermore there’s (apparently) no way of customizing the whole thing so i can’t even pick what goes in one bar and what goes in the other.

So i decided i was using this as a chance to look around for other distros. And i was thinking Debian.

Mint is out for now because all in all it’s just windows-looking ubuntu and i don’t know how they’re going to manage this whole problem

What should i expect? in what is it different, in what is it alike, is it harder to manage, is it different when it comes to possibilities? (like DVD playing and the like, since ubuntu itself needed plugins that weren’t included due to the gnu license, and debian, i heard, is even stricter when it comes to license issues)

Keep in mind i know enough to get by using ubuntu but i’m not particularly experienced other than the bare essentials and some specific issues i needed to fix, so if you’re in doubt wether i could know something or not, just assume i don’t.