Why? I have a hard time imagine a use case where restoring the OS itself would be appropriate.
I can imagine restoring data, obviously, and services running with their personalization ... but the OS is something generic that should be discarded at whim IMHO. You probably chance few basic configuration of some services and most likely that's stored in /etc
but even then 99% is default.
You can identify what you modified via shell history, e.g. history | grep /etc
and potentially save them or you can also use find /etc -type f -newerXY
with a date later than the OS installation and you should find what you modified. That's probably just a few files.
If you do back up anything beyond /home
(which should be on another partition or even disk than the OS anyway) you'll most likely save garbage like /dev
that might actually hinder your ability to restore.
So... sure, image the OS if you actually have a good reason for it but unless you work on archiving and restoring legacy hardware for a museum then I doubt you do need that.
That was posted 3hours ago. By now you could have installed at least 1 "normal" distribution (i.e. pretty much anything that allow you to download packages for your architecture, not LFS) and have some of your work files either copied on
/home
or better mounted as a directory that is safely on another partition or even disk.Don't like whatever you installed? Explain us WHY then we can better help you narrow down what you need.
Overall software availability and performances are pretty much NOT distribution specific.
It is rare that a specific feature is not available as driver that can not be installed somehow, same for state of the art software, e.g. something coming right of the repository rather than a built package.