Guest OS: Debian vs Ubuntu. No differences?

[Sorcerer Stone]

Hello all,
My (host) OS is Win10Pro.

Have a basis question about guest OS choice in vagrantfile.

Most examples I seen uses ubuntu. In my current use case, I have this:

config.vm.box = "ubuntu/focal64"

I ran into some build issues and trying to isolate the problems. I asked the owner of the project. He told me he uses debian not ubuntu. Something like this:
config.vm.box = "debian/buster64"

My question: Since inside the kernal of ubuntu, is really debian. I believe some people prefer debian is because it is very stable. Not even sure when debian has an update last.

Picking ubuntu as guest OS (instead of using debian) should not make any difference in building any linux based project. Am I correct?

Thanks in advance.

[Sorcerer Stone]

Additional question:
I am trying to install yarn using a dockerfile

but I saw a reference built which has the following line:

RUN echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list

(The above came from: https://hub.docker.com/r/jdenly/java-maven-yarn-build-server/dockerfile)

Since my guest os is Ubuntu. I am afraid the above approach installing yarn won't work.

Any suggestion?

[Jim McGinness]

If you're not confident about what you're doing, it's always better to slavishly follow the instructions provided. This is going to limit how many different things you can combine together (that will come with experience).

Yes, there are some differences between Ubuntu and Debian - most of the time they do present serious obstacles.

Looking at my most-used ubuntu install, it has exactly that yarn.list file, so I feel reasonably confident that you can use those instructions from debian on your ubuntu box. 

 -- jmcg

[Jim McGinness]

typo: 'do present serious obstacles' -> 'do not present serious obstacles'