Welp, I just apt purge'd damn near everything except the kernel. How's your Friday going?

My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.

One of us. One of us

(it was nvidia related)

lel we got 'im, boys. /s

Ubuntu Additional Drivers offered me a choice between 11 different nvidia drivers.

nouveau,and then a mishmash of nvidia versions, open, proprietary and server.

Like OP was probably trying to do, had to manually remove the existing driver before you could select anything. All those options were greyed out because of a 'manual installed driver'

And guess what did this 'manual installed driver'? Me? No. Ubuntu's own uograde or running the command for ubuntu to select the 'besr driver'.

Fortunately, I'd been through nvidia hell several times, and knew how to manually perform the removal and install, but felt horrified for any new users that might stumble into this. With changing versions, it can be difficult when searching to work out which results are actually relevant, and which are obsolete.

Always remember anything with a wildcard is your enemy. Triple check before you can trust it and hit enter.
- You're making it to be ridiculous when you just don't understand the process...which is making it seem like it's far more complicated that it actually is.
  
  You literally generally run a single command, like sudo ubuntu-drivers install which will choose the most current and best drivers for your GPU and install them... If you want to install a specific version then sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:535. That's it. If you're on an Ubuntu version you should not be manually installing drivers via APT as there are literally applications whose sole purpose is to properly install gfx drivers...
  
  nouveau drivers come with Ubuntu.
  
  What you'll have to do is purge the currently installed manual drivers and then use ubuntu-drivers to install your gfx drivers;
  
  sudo apt purge nvidia-driver-535 #or whatever your installed version is sudo apt autoremove

Migrating a 8 year old server to fresh new hardware. Can't believe you can basically just rsync one computer to another

You can indeed.

TimeShift. Life saver, and great tool for learning without having to worry about breaking shit permanently.

Yup, its super easy

https://itsfoss.com/backup-restore-linux-timeshift/

the truest form of Linux, without all the GNU bloat, well done! :)

I'd like to interject here...

I feel your pain 😅🫠

Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don't translate perfectly.

Does anyone sell 'Yes, Do As I Say!' stickers?

You could possibly recover from that on console, just install few metapackages. And have backups.

it's "Yes, do as I say!"
- Dammit, my organic memory failed yet again. It's been a while since I've seen that prompt (and I have agreed to that as well at least few times).
- Yeah OP is not gonna die on that

Reinstall using btrfs as the root files system and enable automatic snapshots. The data on your home partition will be fine, just make sure the installer doesn't format it.

More technology does not fix daft manoeuvres! You do learn by your mistakes but keep the environment as simple as possible and add complexity later. Just like I didn't back in the day! Mind you we lived in greyscale back then.

I've been a Linux sysadmin (and I have a lot of customers) for around 25 years now and only during the last 18 months have I bothered with something funky like ZFS - Proxmox is why and that's thanks to Broadcom deciding to fuck up VMware. I have done a lot of migrations and many more to follow. BTRFS is coming along but it is not for me quite yet.

Backups are golden. Even a simple rsync of /home and /etc to a USB stick or two will do for starters. If you want a challenge then try getting the Veeam agent for Linux working, with secure boot. I suggest not yet (secure boot). However, Veeam do a community edition which is free for 10 workloads (VMs/agents). I recently recovered a HP laptop running Home Assistant to a Thinkpad and everything just worked apart from the network, which is pretty reasonable and it took about 20 minutes.

So, I suggest that you get your backups in order first and then you can muck about with confidence. If you have some time and energy then do have a go at Gentoo and/or Arch. I ran Gentoo as my daily driver for some years and now I never fear anything IT related.
Better yet, backup /home to a separate disk and replace after install.
I really need to learn how to do that. I installed SuSE something on my laptop and selected that file system but couldn't find how to do the snapshot stuff. I'm sure I'm just dumb, but also exhausted, and mentally drained.
- You might want to look into Snapper: https://documentation.suse.com/smart/systems-management/html/snapper-basic-concepts/index.html
  
  Booting from snapshots has pulled my chestnuts out of the fire a few times--between using a rolling release distro as my daily driver, and NVIDIA graphics not always behaving well in conjunction with that.

ctrl + z

If you don't mess with the partitions during the install and don't format, and make the same username, you should be back to normal after a reinstall. Take a backup offline, of course.

make sure not to reformat though. it can be a problem depending on the installer his distro uses.

i think its safer to just save the home folder, and replace it later when the system is installed.

Ahh, baby steps.

Around fours years ago I was still using Arch and I somehow decided to try LFS on my main machine (bare metal unfortunately). Started compiling coreutils but as I forgot to specify the build directory to gmake, my /usr/bin directory was being emptied to make space for the coreutils compilation process. Bricked my whole installation.

Now I'm smarter than four years ago as I mainly use NixOS.

Nice, you get a sticker!

Recently upgraded a laptop that had been on the shelf for 5 years up to latest version. Flawless one-step upgrade! nixos. Things never get in a tangle where installing and uninstalling packages leaves random artifacts behind. If you saved it to version control, you can return to a past system configuration and the only thing different is your home directory data.

And yes, if you have a home partition and root partition, that's exactly what you can do. That's the beauty of that approach. But back it up!

Yeah but, you're a towel.

If anything can be salvaged, I'd suggest backing those up, and then proceeding to make a fully fresh install. That will ensure you don't come across issues inherited from the previous blunders, and also, I think, will give you the chance to take the same steps, but wiser than before, and so able to avoid the issues you either caused or came across. (Also something I'd recommend maybe around every 1~2 years, precisely because of being able to restart but wiser)

If you are trying a new install go for something with timeshift or Silver Blue, OpenSUSE snapshotting. You can trash the whole setup, then reboot to the previous state. A catastrophic failure becomes a 1 minute fix.

Last week I accidentally overwrote my configuration.nix file with garbage. If you use NixOS this should fill you with horror. If you don't, that file contains a description of your entire system -- all the packages as well as many settings tweaks to anything from GUI apps to core kernel & systemd options.

I have now learned my lesson and started using git to track my changes. Tbh, I was naively expecting to be able to roll back to a previous config and pull out my configuration file, but that's not how it works. Happily I had already split out the most difficult to reproduce sections into their own files (mostly networking stuff), so it wasn't that catastrophic, but it still turned a few minutes of tinkering into a couple hours of forehead-smacking.

Couple days ago I accidentally removed a package, not fully understanding what would happen. Ended up logging out thinking nothing of it. Couldn't log back in as there were zero sessions available. Also, for some reason a huge on-screen keyboard kept popping up a lot when I'd click on the login panels things.

I am very grateful my distro came with Timeshift by default and that I had a backup from the day before to fix everything. Also glad Rescuezilla allowed me to install Timeshift and restore.

Doesn't matter who you are or what you believe, it's definitely a rite of passage to break your system once. That is something I'll always agree with.

Welcome to the club, here's your penguin 🐧

Congratulations OP!

About a year and a half ago I nuked my root partition with sudo rm -rf /*. Fun times.

That’s just how you unlock the hidden boss fight.

I'm not clear what you've done here, but I've never played with the purge command. I take it you removed a lot of basic packages. How did it happen? Wildcards?

I can't entirely recall the precise details now, but I was trying to uninstall Nvidia and Mesa packages to fix some driver issues. Some mesa-related packages were remaining, and I couldn't figure out why, so I manually typed their names in and purged them, then proceeded to watch python, the desktop environment — everything — all uninstall haha.
- It was all just bloat anyways, who needs anything besides a kernel?

Lol Nvidia has quiet the reputation in the Linux world. Keep at it though. We all make mistakes.

On the bright side, it's never been a better time to switch to an immutable distro...

congrats you're ready for the next step: a declarative package configuration like (non-)guix or nixos

Try to fix it.

Back the hell up. Seriously. I cannot overstate how peaceful life is when your ass is properly covered.

This is my favorite song about proper Linux practices: https://youtu.be/WpQrAbkM3dI

FWIW each new install is faster, especially if you write down the "weird" steps.

I accidentally interrupted a system upgrade, breaking networking and package manager, among other important bits

I did that. Since I had everything backed up to my nextcloud, I just pulled the Debian USB out of my backpack and razed what was left. Rebuilt on the rubble.

Yes.

I wouldn't do it without tests and "enough" experience.

I would backup first.

Then I would install an atomic distro because I wouldn't want to care about this ever again

I've done the same thing (Nvidia related) on a machine hooked up to an expensive scientific instrument. Didn't get any other work done that day... Ugh.

Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?

Yes, but you might have to muck around with /etc/fstab. The reason is because when you install to your root partition, the installer will create a new /home in that root partition. (Unless you have an installer that's smart enough that you can tell it otherwise.)

You should be able to mount the partition in any case, but to have the system recognize it as /home it has to be properly set up in fstab.

I overwrote my ssh private key with rsync. Fortunately I had special cron job running on my servers that updates ssh public keys on a server with ssh public keys from my github account, so I just had to upload a new key to the github and wait for a few hours.

The best way to learn something is by hurting you.

I try to keep everything I care about in one folder that is backed up regularly, so it’s not such a big deal to reinstall the OS.

Spent half the day debugging wifi and kernel panic issues during boot. What finally fixed it was adding 5 sec delay to iwd service so wifi card firmware can do it's thing (or at least I think thats why it helped).

Average .ml purges

My pacman -Syu crashed on my old laptop and at this point I might just reinstall it, this time putting on some sort of a snapshot solution on it like on my main laptop

Btrfs with pre and post pacman-triggered snapshots. Only had to use it once, but it was very smooth.
- yeah, that's how I roll there

D'hoe...

Nice day to move to nixos ;)

OP mentioned having used Linux for 4 weeks. If they are interested in learning more about Linux, I feel like even Arch would be a better next step.

I love NixOS and have been using it for over a year at this point but sometimes when things don't work I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall. I've been using Linux for ~7 years now.
See my top-level comment; even if they're ready for the complexity, it doesn't protect you from a similar mistake!

What where some of the commands you where unsure of? Might be able to help if it's a common problem like smb sharing.