The main difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is the package manager. Most of the rest is just selected default values for configuration and cosmetics, and what helper scripts are or aren’t present on the system. They’re both mainstream distributions aimed at the general user, and they’re shaped by their goals.
To see how different distributions can be, you need to compare the mainstream distributions to stuff that’s decidedly not mainstream, like Gentoo, Alpine, and Nix.
Just as a trivia note: Gentoo does package a couple of other distros’ package managers (app-arch/rpm and app-arch/dpkg), for use in installing otherwise-unavailable commercial binaries, although I suspect app-arch/rpm2targz sees more use than either of them.
NixOS, Alpine and Gentoo are also pretty popular, but yeah, Fedora and Ubuntu it is the distros the regular person is associating linux with. Or doesnt know what is linux at all :)
That can be done, but as others mentioned, if you don’t have permissions/other attributes for the files it’s going to be a real PITA to get everything working. If I had to do that I’d just copy over the files, chown everything to root and then use package manager to reinstall everything, but even that will most likely need manual fixes and figuring out what to change and to what value will take quite a bit of time and complexity of it depends heavily on what you had running on the host, specially things under /var.
I don’t think so, but you should be able to create an install usb, same as for linux, boot into that, and access recovery tools. From there, you can definitely run chkdsk, done it before though I don’t recall every step.
For those who don’t know, shift+F10 to bring up a command prompt when using a windows install image. Can do it when it starts asking you for stuff. I know the chkdsk tools and manage-bde (the bitlocker cli) are avaliable there at least.
If even file owner is not preserved (it is not always root, espetially in /var), you likely lost files’ extanded attributes an, maybe, also permissions. Without them your system won’t work normally.
Then, contents of these directories must be consistent with other ones. E. g. /var contains a package manager data about packages you installed. If you installed/removed anything after creating a backup, information about this will be lost.
If you created the backup while system was working, some files (espetially under /var, again) could be changed during that process, and this also makes such backup unusable. Every sysadmin knows that to create a database backup by copying files, dbms must be stopped.
In future, think about restoration before planning a backup and test if this possible immediately after it is done.
There’s no Red Hat anymore, it was sold to IBM 5 years ago. All their recent shifts in FOSS strategy are a predictable result of that. IBM only cares to streamline RHEL operations not about what’s usable or appropriate for Linux in general.
Copying back the files to the right partition/directory works, but if you didn’t backup the owner and permissions for each file it’s gonna be a pain to restore those.
After reinstalling, you can compare your new system with your backup to see what changes/configs you had made
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