I just installed Rocky 9.5. Downgraded packages from Fedora 40. That was an adventure.
As most may know downgrading is arduous. The configuration files could not just be copied from the Fedora 40 system backup to the Rocky configurations files. I had to diff each configuration file that had been modified in Fedora with the file in Rocky and reconcile them putting only my changes into the Rocky files.
I am a KDE guy, so the installation of KDE and the swap of gdm to sddm had to be done early for familiarity. I like kate and kdiff3 for editing and merging of files.
I don’t run just a workstation, so I had a lot of packages to install and configure; dns. apache, cups, zoneminder, mariadb, postgreSQL, samba, and more. Took awhile. Had to install some selinux policies for some things the targeted policy doesn’t handle.
Finally got firewalld, selinux, and rest configured.
So far, I like that Rocky is not as active as Fedora. I don’t need to be on the edge. Stable is good.
Rocky, and presumably Fedora, does support “drop-in” config files for many services.
For example, the /etc/ssh/sshd_configincludes/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*.conf
(and part of default config is in those files too). The rationale is to drop in user customizations
as separate files, without modifying the config file(s) provided by the package.
That makes it easier to find “my choices” later. Alas, all that does not help if the option was not used earlier.
Furthermore, one still has the “earlier/other version did not support this config option” dilemmas.
Red Hat promotes configuration management system – “Ansible” – and System Roles for it. Ideally, it can have a logical (easy to backup) config that it can deploy to multiple distros. In other words, it might know some “How to do it with these versions?” rules for you.
Same caveat, a configuration management system does not help in transfer if it was not used with Fedora.