Perhaps you can spot the package that got removed in /var/log/apt/history.log.
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That was actually my first attempt, but unfortunately I removed 484 packages during that process, so checking the log didn't help me much. Some packages that were removed had many dependencies that I could quickly recover, like Dolphin and Okular, but in the end I was left with ~100 packages that I don't know what they do.
While I could technically reinstall all of them manually, it would be less than ideal since many are indeed not needed and supposed to be removed during that update (apt complains about conflicts).
~$ awk '$1 == "2024-03-13" && $3 == "remove" {gsub(":amd64",""); print $4}' /var/log/dpkg.log | wc -w
484
I am open to suggestions if you know how I could recover from this or improve my awk filter to make things easier.
100 isn't that many really. If you're really curious I would try reinstalling them in steps of 10 to narrow it down. And when/if you identified the pack of 10 with the culprit, uninistall those 10 and install 1 by 1: max number of reinstalls/uninstalls = 20
Just reinstall plasma-desktop
or however the metapackage is called
Are you on BTRFS? If so maybe you could restore to a snapshot prior to the apt upgrade?
I'm not very familiar with Debian, but perhaps there are official "groups" of packages that comprise a set of softwares, like KDE. Perhaps you could re-install that group, if it exists?
You could also create a new user, log in as that user, and see if the issue persists. If so then you'll know it's a system wide issue. If not, then maybe you could migrate to the new user?
Good luck!
Sadly I am not using BTRFS for my root directory on this specific system. If I end up deciding to reinstall, I will definitely go back to BTRFS to avoid such problems.
Debian actually has a KDE group named kde-full. I reinstalled it but the issue persists, which was honestly surprising to me.
~$ sudo apt install kde-full
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
kde-full is already the newest version (5:147).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 87 not upgraded.
The new user idea was really clever, thanks for the suggestion! I will try that now and see.
Edit: the new user also presents the same problem. Actually, it makes sense, since SDDM is affected as well (I should have mentioned that before).
You will also need to use snapper before every apt-get upgrade to avoid these issues