Oh, no doubt it works. It's fine if you want to run on older software. You might just miss out on the latest new features for your hardware.
Yes Ubuntu is based on Debian only in the way that it uses the same package manager. The packages are not the same though. They have a totally different release cycle and the repos have more up to date packages and drivers. Not to mention the additional quality of life improvements.
It's a good middle ground between super stable but older Debian and unstable and bleeding edge distros.