It sucks, it doesn't work properly in Firefox, so I have keep it open in a Chromium window too. This morning I saw new messages in my Chromium but not in Firefox until I reloaded the page. I wonder what other information it's keeping from me.
I switched someone recently (she installed mint instead of kubuntu that recommended) and soon after exclaimed that it's just like windows. I think she assumed everything would be in a terminal lol, now she gaming in steam. Anyway you'll probably find it more similar than different. The one big difference is that we don't download and run software from the Internet, we have something like an app store where everything is vetted and trustworthy.
My first thought is that this was to make Linux palatable to western regulations, like how companies can't use Kaspersky anymore. Stupid if I'm right because it's not like the fsb is going to sneak spyware into Linux.
If it were me, I'd do a fresh minimal install of the same OS, boot to the livecd and then delete pretty much everything except for /etc and /boot. I'd then cp -ar all my files from the failing drive and then manually merge /etc back. I say manually merge because most things would get replaced by my old files, but I'd manually modfify my fstab to keep the new partition information and add my extra mounts after it. Maybe that's just me though. You can also just dd and then resize partitions if necessary.
FreeFileSync detects moves and changes quickly without rereading the whole file. The first time you sync it will read every file to hash them first, this takes a long time but subsequent syncs will be fast.
It sucks, it doesn't work properly in Firefox, so I have keep it open in a Chromium window too. This morning I saw new messages in my Chromium but not in Firefox until I reloaded the page. I wonder what other information it's keeping from me.