Help please. - Want to switch distro

[Krister Ekstrom <krister kristersplace ws>]

Hello everyone. I have an old Debian 3.something version of Linux which
i have dist-upgraded many times, so now i fear it's broken. I don't have
a swedish keyboard anymore and i don't know how to correct everything i
have done to make it like this, so rather than go through the trouble of
trying to fix things that i don't know how to fix, i have decided to try
something more modern. I want to run the latest Gnome with all the
things that can be run under it, such as openoffice, Evolution, Mozilla
and so on.
I've heard of Ubuntu and that it contains much of the latest and
greatest things, so i figure i should switch to it, but i have some
questions:
First of all, where could one obtain the latest Ubuntu? Is it somewhat
easy to install? Does Ubuntu have a package manager similar to Apt in
Debian or do you have to build from source? How about Orca, has it
reached the stage where a non-programmer can use it, or is Gnopernicus
to prefer if one isn't that good at modifying things using program
languages such as Python?
Thanks in advance for any answer.
-- 
/Krister