I hear this is a rite of passage. I made it 4 weeks before I rekt all my shit (it was nvidia related). Where do I claim my sticker?
In all seriousness, now that I understand better these commands that I’ve been haphazardly throwing around, Id like to do a clean install. God knows what else Ive done to it. Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?
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.
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.
TimeShift. Life saver, and great tool for learning without having to worry about breaking shit permanently.
Yup, its super easy
My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.
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?
(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 installwhich will choose the most current and best drivers for your GPU and install them… If you want to install a specific version thensudo 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-driversto install your gfx drivers;sudo apt purge nvidia-driver-535 #or whatever your installed version is sudo apt autoremoveYou misunderstood what I wrote.
I didn’t manually install anything.
On my machine, Ubuntu upgrade/install AND sudo ubuntu-drivers install BOTH flag the drivers Ubuntu installed as manually installed.
When you go to the Additional Drivers, it says you have manually installed drivers and all options are greyed out.
Why do I want another driver? I found the open driver Ubuntu chose to install was flaky and provided substandard performance compared to the proprietary driver.
And I have my commands to remove drivers, and for reference, the commands you give won’t help a noob, and your steps are incomplete for earlier Ubuntu versions.
I didn’t manually install anything.
Like I said, you’re misrepresenting what’s happened here…
You said specifically that you had to remove the existing driver, and those drivers don’t come pre-installed, nor do they get automatically installed. So you had to have installed them yourself for you to have to remove them to install the right driver. lol
Reread my comment.
“On my machine, Ubuntu upgrade/install AND sudo ubuntu-drivers install BOTH flag the drivers Ubuntu installed as manually installed.”
That’s why I have to manually remove them to choose a better nvidia driver.
I can’t say it any clearer
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.
