I was trying to remove protontricks, because somehow 3 different copies (from appstore, apt, and pip) ended up on my computer and was causing mayhem and issues trying to run things, so I could reinstall a single version and try to get it to work.
Somewhere along the way something screwed up/got removed and now my computer is booting only to terminal, with no display environment, it wont even load when i run the command.
I've tried to boot into recovery, but I cant do anything because networking is disabled (yes I did try to click the enable networking option, doesnt do anything, wired networking is disabled but visible via..wich command i can not say, because i'vedone somany in the past several hours that its just blended mush) and nothing i can do can get it enabled, and without networking i cant connect to the internet to download any of the packages to try and restore my install. I also don't have networking at bog standard terminal after logging into my account.
I've been beating my head against this for the past 5 hours, and I've tried every command that I can find with internet searches, and I am no closer to anything but a format and reinstall, which I really want to avoid since i just got things going the way I liked them and i dont want to lose all my installs/settings/preferences/setups/etc.
Which leads me here, I'm begging for any help anyone could provide to try and avoid reformating and reinstalling.
edit: Okay, so I have no network management at all. nothing can find it, and i dont know how to install it so I have given up and tried to do the ubuntu reinstall where it just restores its packages and doesnt touch anything else.. except the option to do that isnt on my liveusb, despite every search and guide i've found showing it as an option.
So I dont know what to do, Unless I can run apt on a live USB and have it affect the SSD install instead of the USB install? If not I'm just about to the point of just sucking it up and reformating. Why does everything have to be so pointlessly, frustratingly, obtusely miserable pains in the ass with this shit!? God, This was not the day for me to have to deal with this, on top of everything else going wrong this weekend.
If this was too cryptic, boot a live USB, mount the installation, the do something like poke through apt history to see what may have caused the trouble. You can chroot into the install and fix stuff too!
You beautiful Man/Woman/Other, that solved like 95% of the problem.
I was able to follow that and chroot into my broken install from a liveusb, and get my broken system talking to the internet again to download almost all the broken packages and restore things almost perfectly... Only problem that remains is my networking is nonexistent.
lshw -c network and advance network configuration shows my ethernet device properly, but lshw lists it as disabled, and going into ubuntu network options doesnt show anything.
I've spent about the past half hour working on this, and the various suggestions involved editing /etc/netplan/01-network-manager-all.yaml (on the assumption it was erased/altered/etc, but mine was fine so i didnt touch it), to tryhing to reboot the networking via various commands aginst networkmanager.services and netplan, none of which worked. Most everything else I found was, sadly, from like 10 years ago and i was hesitant to try commands from that long ago for fear of breaking things again/worse.
You've already saved me so much with your first post, so I hate to lean on you further.. but if you have anything that can solve this, I would invent a machine to get you my chocolate cherry from across the internet.
edit
NEVERMIND! FIXED IT!
netplan.io had to be reinstalled, and unlike everything else, apt didnt suggestion netplan***.io*** when i typed in netplan. Network is up and everythings running perfect!
Thank you for everything!