Convert Debian Jessie to Ubuntu Server 16.04 (without doing a clean install from bootable media)

I would like to convert my debian jessie machine into an ubuntu server machine. Ideally, I just want to swap out all the core packages, preserving my users, files, and other settings. Is this even possible, or am I looking at having to reinstall all the applications I've build on top of this server and create a fresh install of ubuntu server?

My thoughts are something to the effect of swapping out all the packages in sources.list and doing a dist-upgrade or if there is a way to install the commands to do one of ubuntu's release upgrades to try that. Any ideas?

Side note:

You may be wondering why I want to do this. The reason is simple: driver support. I want to do GPU computing on this machine in addition to all its server functions; however, this proved difficult to impossible with companies only releasing newer and well supported drivers for redhat and ubuntu. I don't want to deal with this hassle, so I was looking to just switch the OS.

4 Sorted by: Reset to default

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