this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Packages are a tree with stuff like glibc at the root and stuff like your browser at the leaf nodes. Total disaster normally entails doing interesting things and create things to break your package database or removing things too far up the tree python being an obvious and funny case. Hey I just asked it to get rid of python why did it ask to remove half my system!
I'm guessing you tried to install KDE from a repo outside of mint or ubuntu because hey kubuntu is just kde and ubuntu. When you ask your pkg manager to come to a solution, tell it its ok to remove packages and insist it install something non-compatible sometimes it just fails sometimes it offers interesting solutions. For instance maybe you tried to install something call it package D that was incompatible with the packages A and B but not strictly incompatible with C. So it tells you well you asked to have D you can have C and D if you let me jettison A and B. This is when you tell it no thank you and ask it a smarter question.
You can also get interesting solutions by trying to force it to install things it failed on, on some distros by half upgrading things so you have packages that depend on different versions and then trying to upgrade one thing without finishing the upgrade, or manually installing things.
Great explination, though I'll be clear this was a friend of mine who installed plasma through the software center provided by mint with no additional repositories added. This, after seeing me do so on another system of theirs to show them plasma, the issue could very well have been what you've described.
Look at what happened with steam and PopOs which when trying to install wiped the desktop environment. Although this, ide breaking the machine, was localized solely on this singular machine. I do assume it was some irronious package mismatch that this person clicked "accept" on without reading what action would be taken
The person skipped a few steps when they did something stupid where they had to pass a flag for it to remove crap in the cli too
Does synaptics or even apt take care of these things automatically during install or do you manually need to configure every app you download?
This is a great answer thanks. I always install the environments through apt or synaptics. Then one of my issues or maybe its normal, all the packages and apps comingle I feel thats where the problem lays. I want each environment to be separate and actually be their perspective environment instead of each being a mish mash of each other. Hope that makes sense. It always causes issues for me at least. Also tried separated accounts for each environment and I'm sure thats a good way, but it didn't work probably do to permissions. Idk how to set the right permissions to keep them seperste