I thought debian was a kernel or some other pseudo code name for something non-understandabe to noobs.

Debian is a distro?

Old Martian

"Debian is a distro?"

Yes, but only for advanced users. LOL

If that really was a serious question, then, yes, Debian is a distro. I believe that Ubuntu and Kubuntu are children, so to speak, of Debian. For some reason, people seem to have problems with it; or at least it's "in" to say that they do. Personally, I like the way Debian does things; but then, I'm a bit "old school".

Or Gentoo... Or Slackware... Or Mandrake... Or Fedora... Or DSL... Or, well........ :P

I'm not sure that really is such a "bad" idea...

One of the benefits of the *Buntu setup is (for example) people who setup an SSH daemon on their system, but don't secure it properly (Protocol 2, (dis)AllowRootLogin, AllowGroups etc), if root is enabled and often with a weak password, someone trying to crack in to the system will get straight in as root, and they will most likely try 'root' as their default username when trying to brute force it (experience from the receiving end here!)

If the root account is disabled, and only accessible via sudo, then the cracker not only has to guess / brute force your password and then sudo to root, they also have to guess your user name too. That exponentially increases the possibilities that they have to try.

They know there's a 'root' account (they don't *know* if it's enabled, or what it's password is, but they know it's there)
They have no idea what your user name is, nor what your password is.

I can't grasp what you are ranting about. There are things in Windows also that require you to log in as the administrator.

You can configure any Linux distro--including Ubuntu--with any number of options, including:

1. no passwords required for anything
2. su for admin privileges (no sudo)
3. sudo privileges for certain users only
4. specific functions restricted to privileged users
5. and more

Tell us exactly how you want it configured....

If Ubuntu was created from Debian, than is Debian more hardware friendly?

Is Debian better than Ubuntu?

"Is Debian better than Ubuntu?"

Is red better than blue?

Only you can decide if you believe it's better for your purposes...

Both are free, try for yourself. Both are excellent but Ubuntu appears more focused on the desktop. BY focus alone, Ubuntu might be a better choice given the specifics of your question. As an Ubuntu desktop user, I'm quite satisfied with hardware compatibility and ease of use.

Debian
 

I thought Kubuntu was debian-based.

Kubuntu is Ubuntu based, and Ubuntu is Debian based :)

Splitting hairs a bit.
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu are basically all the same. The main differences are the desktops used.

ALL are based on Debian