hey would anyone be willing to help me with some linux stuff, i’ve fucked up big time lol

please boost

@shroomie uhh i can try, no promises though. probably depends on the distro

@strongsand okay. so. last night i decided to upgrade to fedora 41 and sleep while the thing’s doing its thing. turns out, the system ran out of memory at like 11pm (about twelve hours ago from now), so like, i go “okay so howabout i just decide to delete some of my beefier files and get on with the upgrade.”
this goes like. okay. but dolphin, my arch nemesis, is like “okay hun, howabout you do that while i lag and crash repeatedly for daring to use me,” which causes me to go “hm, maybe i should use rm -r so i can bypass all this,” which caused me to run rm -r ~/{CPfL.zip,gzdoom-linux-x64-g4.12pre-420-g144caa090.tar.xz,dsda-doom-0.28.2-Linux.appimage,Hexen\ -\ Beyond\ Heretic.zip,} which i only realized was a mistake of some sort after i decide to check in on it after it ran for a suspiciously long time to see something along the lines of “rm: could not remove files from /home/shroomie/.local/flatpak: directory not empty”

now, my system theme is all messed up, keepassxc forgot i had an archive hooked up to it (the archive is fine though, thank god,) various flatpak apps have disappeared (but oddly not all of them), steam doesn’t launch (despite it being installed from DNF), and oddly the only thing that seems to wrong with librewolf is that it forgot my previous session

@shroomie not entirely sure what’s going on here but it sounds like rm just deleted a ton of files at random from your home directory, the best solution would probably be to try and use a data recovery tool to get back as much as you can. if possible, you should power off your system to prevent the data getting overwritten, boot off a usb drive, and try using something like ext4magic from there

@strongsand uhh i don’t own another usb drive and my system itself is actually a usb drive plugged into an imac and i’ve been on this for hours, how do you know everything’s not been overwritten?

@shroomie i don’t know if everything was already overwritten but i also can’t think of another solution. if your installation is on a usb then you can probably just plug it into another computer and use a file recovery tool from there. but if files were just deleted from your home directory at random, even if you manage to fix everything for now, there will probably be random issues in the future that will be annoying to figure out. at this point maybe just cut your losses, back up everything important, and reinstall?

@strongsand i was thanking of reinstalling lol, i think i’ll go with that.

@strongsand okay so. i haven’t reinstalled yet. i have rebooted, and my theme is completely gone now lol, even down to the mouse. on the topic of the mouse, scroll direction has changed and the sensitivity settings have changed as well. my desktop seems functional but there’s no system trey or whatever it’s called so i have to go to one of my TTYs and run WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-0 application in order to get anything open

@strongsand okay so like WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-0 doesn’t always work so now i’m learning about environment variables