Follow-up from “Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?”.
Here’s mine - the laptop from which I’m typing right now has a broken touchpad that keeps jumping and clicking randomly, and does not work. Well, I can’t afford to fix it, but at the moment, I was so pissed off I punched the touchpad really hard, and the machine panicked with all the lights blinking. A few more revival abuses, and the machine was back to life, but since I was running a nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade in the background, I blew off my boot partition. I think I just broke the unbreakable distro.
My computer was taking too long to start up, which I interpreted as failing to boot, but in hindsight was probably just my hard drive being slow. So, I booted into recovery mode, and ran an update. At one point, apt said “there are unnecessary packages” and would I like to remove them? I figured that apt knew better than I did (after all, maybe a package dropped a dependency), so I said yes.
It was after I noticed the very large number of packages that I suspected I messed up. Turns out, apt uninstalled the entire desktop environment, and network manager, so I had to boot into a USB drive with Network Manager installed, chroot into my main drive, and reinstall plasma. As a bonus, I think I missed the main group for the plasma desktop and only installed only most of it, so some of my extensions just didn’t work anymore.
That was a good read, thanks for sharing!