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.