After upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 I couldn't get used to Gnome and decided to try out KDE Plasma. After installing KDE and playing around a bit I decided to move back to Gnome as I thought it's the lesser of two evils.
I also wanted to get rid of the Kubuntu splash screen and Plasma as such and followed someone's advice and removed the Kubuntu desktop using tasksel (I was using Gnome while doing it). During the process I saw that all of my software is getting removed one after another and suddenly the DE wasn't usable at all. After rebooting there was no GUI and I could only access the terminal. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible for me to install ANYTHING as it always returned a "missing archive" error. Even booting from a live CD doesn't work as I only see the background image - no panels, no software, nothing. BTW: Booting from the same live CD on another computer worked perfectly.
Is there any way I can repair my ubuntu installation? I want at least to be able to copy my files from the HDD and save some configurations.
Thanks
tasksel
for removing packages. But you can fix your system bysudo apt-get install ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-desktop
(change last to desired desktop). – N0rbert Aug 22 '18 at 15:56