I'm considering switching from Ubuntu Debian. What is the best (smallest effort) way to switch?

I have a number of packages installed and configured on a Linode VPS:

• apache2.4
• mariadb10.0
• php5-fpm
• php5
• dovecot
• postfix
• fail2ban

For some of these I have a significant number of configuration changes. I dread the thought of doing it all over again in another distro, although it's hopefully fairly similar in Debian.

OS configuration and packages are very similar between Ubuntu and Debian. You'll need to manually migrate everything yourself, but it should be a walk in the park as far as box migrations go

Ubuntu is based on Debian so yes virtually everything should run the same. Some of the differences might be the version of certain software available. Implementing something like Salt (http://saltstack.com/) or similar software can make things easier for the future.

It's a great learning experience

Thanks for your input.

I decided to go ahead with it! Took me several hours, but have managed to get everything except postfix & dovecot up and running properly again. I have a backup of my old config, so it should be possible, in the fullness of time, to sort out those last bits as well.

So far I've not noticed any real differences between Debian and Ubuntu.

MariaDB surprised me with somehow locking all the user accounts I had imported from the dump file. I had to run ' FLUSH PRIVILEGES; ' to unlock them / make them work again.