There was a time when the gulf between a new computer and one a decade or more old was so large as to be insurmountable; when a Pentium was the chip to have an older computer had a 16-bit 8086 or 286.

Debian and Ubuntu are similar, but they're not the same Debian is more stable, and Ubuntu is easier to use. I'd only recommend one of them to users new to Linux. Ubuntu is based on Debian, and ...