Hello, pretty new Linux user here, sorry in advance for the Topic!!
A note in advance, I didn’t get around to learning how to use BTFSR yet due to basically starting with Linux from Win10 back in June. (Have been enjoying it a lot actually)
Yesterday I performed a couple of updates which has seemingly removed Wayland and X-11 from my device, I did manage to fix that part with some googling and browsing these threads and seems like for some reason the updates basically removed them because when I wanted to check startplasma-wayland it just said unknown Command, please try installing it via sudo apt install plasma-workspace & plasma-workspace-wayland which I then did and I was able to go back to Wayland that way.
Now the issue afterwards is, that I need to perform that step every time, also did a bunch of browsing and as far as I understood that might have been part of SDDM not doing something, checked for it as well and enabled its service, didn’t test that yet but it isn’t that important either.
The Main Issue in this case is that seemingly all basic functions have disappeared / not installed.
I’m unable to check out details inside Discover when I press on an application as well.
I even had to reinstall Dolphin for files or Konsole to get back to the console (I’m assuming the other method would’ve been going back into TTY).
Items like VLC Media player also seem to be missing out of nowhere.
Items like Bluetooth no longer are possible to use but have been working increasingly better over the past weeks and I get constant KWIN errors as well as crashreports.
Again, sorry for either lacking etiquette or knowledge!!
Timeshift would be a brilliant answer here - it takes snapshots of your system that you can use to ‘roll back’.
Back-in-time is the second answer (as snapshots are ‘system only’) which would also take incremental snapshots of your personal files and store them safely.
With Snapshots AND Backups, you can recover from a complete hardware failure (in my case twice already, 5 years ago the main SSD failed, so I lost my snapshots, but a fresh install allowed me to recover from back-in-time backups) then again 3 years ago my PSU exploded and took out the Mobo/CPU requiring a fresh build).
BRTFS filesystem basically makes Snapshots instant (i.e. reboot and it’s done).
It’s possible to export BTRFS snapshots to be backed up on a mounted drive (example /mnt/T3). I didn’t do this, but basically they need to be read-only and I think this means you need to set up snapper instead of Timeshift.
What I learned few months ago: apt has a log file where you can look what exactly was installed or removed. My issue was that Wayland was removed from Mobian via autoremove. It is a good spot to search for the “super fundamental” what krake said. For Debian based systems it is in /var/log/apt, including time stamps (so look close before the issue appeared).
Unfortunately apt wasn’t too happy with the command and looks like a knotes is not installable The following packages have unmet dependencies: kde-standard : Depends: knotes (>= 4:23.08.5) but it is not installable E:Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
Also sorry for the time it takes to reply due to the time difference. ;;;
I’ll check what else I can do during work but the whole situation is also somewhat amusing honestly.
Really curious what happened to kind of just make it do whatever it did!
Following the advice of Marata below I also checked apt log files and a massive wall of removals was spotted after Preparing to unpack …/coreutils_9.4-3ubuntu6.1_amd64.deb … Unpacking coreutils (9.4-3ubuntu6.1) over (9.4-3ubuntu6) … Setting up coreutils (9.4-3ubuntu6.1) …
So I’ll try to hunt after those as well haha.
Edit: oop, didn’t know it’d paste all below.
As per the other replies, Thanks Marata for bringing attention to the Logs, certainly interesting to see!
And thanks @ben2talk!!, I’ll be checking them out as well even if I have to reinstall the entire thing if I can’t do anything about the current status of it.
Was trying to do a backup before but couldn’t really figure out how so Timeshift and Back-in-Time seem rather powerful.
Though I might as well install BRTFS at some point, especially if I have to clean the entire thing up in the future.
kde-standard is a meta-package found in Debian and Ubuntu, but neon does not use it, so it has dependencies that are for the older Plasma 5 things, hence the errors.
I suggest trying either neon-desktop or plasma-desktop meta-packages to try to re-install any missing Plasma components and missing packages, or at least paint a better picture of what may be the cause.
This would be easier than creating a list of the removed packages found in your logs to (re) install.
Thank you a lot! That did seem to return a couple of the applications, though can’t tell if everything since I installed them manually this morning, like Dolphin etc, it did return VLC again though so I’m highly assuming it did return the base applications!
Now I only need to figure out why the boot time has been slowed marginally as well as see why it can’t see my Bluetooth adapter anymore, seems to my untrained eye like some of the modules were either removed or just aren’t being seen/recognised anymore;;;
Surprisingly all the manually added stuff does seem to be present / unmodified.
Example being GPU drivers that are a bit too new for 24.04 (amd 9070XT) and manually added modules for sensor detection.
Bluetooth seems to be completely shot though which, I’ve been fighting it already so it’s just the usual (though it’s not possible to turn on at all now after the full removal of stuff).
I’ll be continuing trying to figure out what happened while working, thank you again for the suggestions!! Learning in real time over here haha.
Installing neon-desktop and plasma-desktop also seems to have (for now) fixed the issue with Wayland crashing after once the screen turns off when locking the screen after the updates performed 2 days ago.
Though that might be connected to only having a single monitor plugged in due to a KVM switch.
I’m unsure as of what is missing as I’m likely not using all of the backend items though connected might be firmware issues after the incident.
I’m assuming a reinstall might be easier than trying to return the past working condition as boot times suffer as well as back-end items not being noticed / used any longer.
As Bluetooth is the one I use most and is easy to notice, it doesn’t seem to register my bluetooth adapter any longer and reports: systemd[1]: Requested transaction contradicts existing jobs: Transaction for bluetooth.service/start is destructive (local-fs.target has 'stop' job queued, but 'start' is included in transaction).
in the journal.
As I don’t want to take up good will and time of you kind people,
Would the best advise be to reinstall and hope that removes the issues completely?
Major lesson here would’ve been getting to know TTY as well as how to start Wayland as well as that I shouldn’t have given up on trying to make a local backup, many thanks again for the suggestion of the 2 tools! And big thank you for the help!
I’ll see if I can resolve the Bluetooth thing somehow and scour the internet for it a solution.
