Upgrade from 16.04.x to 18.04.3 broke system - was Upgrade paths from UbuntuMATE 16.04.x and 18.04.x to 19.10

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Bret Busby wrote:

>This seems to have worked out a bit like the Chinese parable "The old
>man who lost a horse" (well worth reading and understanding).

I see.

>I copied what data I could access, from the Debian (version 6 -
>hadn't looked at it for years) and UbuntuMATE installations,
>eliminated the Debian and Ubuntu installations, did a bit of
>repartitioning, to expand the / and /swap partitions, and, installed
>UbuntuMATE 19.04, with a properly now separate /home partition, and
>now, it works better, including that the wifi now works with
>UbuntuMATE.

What do you mean by "eliminated the Debian and Ubuntu installations"
above? Has the data you weren't able to retrieve by other means now
been deleted? Or does everything still exist?

>However, I lost (gave up on) the data associated with my primary user
>account in UbuntuMATE 18.04.
>
>"Such is life".

No, no. It still exists (unless you've eliminated it above). You
changed the ownership of it and just need to change ownership again.
You should be able to follow the last link I sent you to use the
command to change the ownership to yourself instead of root. Here's
hoping you can still do that.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.