[lug] Recovering from massive Ubuntu mess

[Jed S. Baer]

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 16:04:28 -0700
Jed S. Baer wrote:

> Apparently, tasksel "helps" by running apt autoremove. The 1st thing in
> it's display was a taskbar removing a bunch of stuff. I've been avoiding
> doing autoremove, despite apt telling me I could do so, because of how
> badly I got hosed the last time.

I decided to take off and nuke it from orbit. Well, at least, this being my
4th install of Ubuntu 20.4, with fresh memories, I was able to blaze
through things very quickly. Of course, it helps that my /home is on a
different partition, so I didn't lose any preferences stored there. And,
I've been running a nightly rdiff-backup for over a year, so it was easy to
look back and see what changes I'd made. Digging back in the BLUG list
jogged my memory too.

I also was smart enough this time to make another partition on the system
disk so that I can dual-boot something else later, once I decide whether to
play with Arch, or Void (the current leading contenders, in my mind).

Now, 24 hrs. later, I can return to getting a Samba share available, which
is what started me on this side-trip. Well, once I get chirp going in
flatpak, and restore my crontabs - I think that's all that's left.

The list of stuff apt tells me I can get rid of with autoremove is already
quite large. I think I'll look for a way to disable that operation, as it's
as dangerous as rm -rf /* for practical purposes.

-- 
All operating systems suck, but Linux just sucks less
 - Linus Torvalds