I recently watched Red Hat: why I’m going all in on community-driven Linux distros. from Veronica Explains, after which I decided to try to seriously use Debian 12 rather than Ubuntu in my daily computer work. This is working reasonably well. I have run into a variety of differences, but so far I have overcome them. A lot of these have to do with Gnome. I have learned a lot about Gnome in the last few days, chiefly how little I actually know about it.
The first thing I did was to Install Flatpak on Debian. With that done I installed Flatpak version of Firefox, to replace the Firefox ESR that ships with Debian. I also changed the default app for web pages to the Flatpak Firefox rather than FireFox ESR. Firefox comes from the Mozilla foundation, unlike the other major browsers which are the products of large for-profit companies. I also changed the default search engine for Firefox from Google to DuckDuckGo.
As shipped Debian’s Gnome is missing some of the conveniences I have become accustomed to on Ubuntu. The window title bars did not have the minimize and maximize icons. This can be fixed with Gnome Tweaks or by
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout ":minimize,maximize,close"
in a terminal window. You can also use Alt+Space as a shortcut to bring up the window menu. See also
It is possible to to move the apps dock to the left with Vertical overview, which looks more like recent versions of Ubuntu Gnome. Dash to Dock makes the dock persistent, also like Ubuntu. This dock is at the bottom, and I have not yet figured out how to make it work well with Vertical overview.
Window List puts a Windows-style window list at the bottom of the screen. I don’t see the need to have such a list and the persistent dock at the bottom. I don’t know yet which I will prefer in the long run.
For compatibility with Ubuntu I ran
timedatectl set-local-rtc 0
to be sure the system clock used UTC. See Time in Windows and Linux. I had thought all Linux systems used UTC, but that may not be the case.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 
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