I've been using Ubuntu since the spring of 2005, that is for over 8 years. I appreciate the Debian underpinnings, predictable releases, general fit and finish. However, now I'm using Gnome Shell instead of Unity and I feel that there's not much value provided to me in over plain Debian Testing. Moreover, I'm unconvinced in the general direction of Ubuntu is taking for the past couple of years, the "Not Invented Here" mentality of developing competitors to other Open Source projects (Unity, indicatorors, Mir). So I decided to switch.
I downloaded a Debian Testing (wheezy) netboot 23 MB mini.iso image, set it up to boot with GRUB from a USB flash drive, made a copy of my system partition, and rebooted. Long story short, the installer failed on the base system install stage, something about unable to authenticate the busybox package. I've spent a couple of hours fumbling around trying to get past the error, downloaded a different version of the wheezy netboot image, to no avail. I also tried the 200 MB mini-CD image, but that failed with "Could not mount the CD-ROM" being booted off a flash drive.
After a while I just restored the backup, updated the new root FS UUID in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.cfg and went on with life. On Ubuntu. I'm still on Precise, probably worth trying an upgrade to Raring. I'll keep the backup of the Precise system partition, though.
