Linux Mint has a Debian Edition. I think it's based off Testing rather than Unstable. That would probably be my default recommendation for newbies. Personally

Linux Mint has a Debian Edition. I think it's based off Testing rather than Unstable. That would probably be my default recommendation for newbies. Personally I'm using Crunchbang, which is minimalist, lightweight, based on Stable, and comes with a nice set of install scripts for web servers and databases and suchlike. Generally speaking though, if I were moving code between platforms, I would make sure that my staging environment matched whatever the production environment was -- I suspect not Ubuntu.