While I was adding Golang to the PATH my terminal (Konsole) suddenly stopped recognizing basic commands like nano and ls. I restared my PC and after logging back in (X11) KDE started throwing errors because it wasn’t able to find any program I tried to launch. Konsole is gone. I can’t open any program whatsoever (Firefox, Discover etc.). Trying to log in into Wayland just throws a black screen. After a few more reatarts I decided to use the terminal from the login screen, but it is broken as well. ls not found, nano and vim don’t exist. So far I can use pwd and cd.
What the hell is wrong here? Is it hardware failure (bad SSD)? Is there anything I can attempt to recover the system?
in your shoes: i would switch to a virtual terminal to see if my path has been misconfigured.
most distros have setup alt+ctrl+f1 through alt+ctrl+f7 to let you switch to a virtual terminal where it will give you a cli after you login. once you do; you can use either
echo $PATHorenvto inspect your environment configuration.if i’m right and based on your description; i would expect the same command not found message and you’ll need to restore it. you can restore it using either an environment skeleton (assuming your distro includes one) or you can get a basic one from a google search and reconstruct it.
also if i 'm right: i recommend using a versioning system (eg git, svn, perforce, etc.) so that you can easily roll back in case you encounter something like this again.