Transferring schema from MySql to MariaDB

- My development environment has XAMPP, which means I have MariaDB installed. - The production has MySQL 8 installed. 1. When I transfer new schema changes from MariaDB to MySQL, it works mostly. I have to fiddle sometimes. 2. But my main problem is when I backup the MySQL schema and data and try to restore it to my PC, well I have given up. It requires too many changes. Many issues are related to character sets. Is there something I can do to make #2 easier? Maybe some rules about what to avoid on MySQL.