Also, Ubuntu is just too shit to deal with now, but I don't have any means of backing up my stuff to move over to Debian.
It's possible to do an in-place upgrade from Ubuntu to Debian (I've gone from Trisquel to Debian myself, which is essentially the same thing), but it's unsupported and I wouldn't recommend it unless you
really know what you're doing, or are prepared to reinstall if you fuck up.