ik am stupid and I am aware there are a slew of different errors involved here and partial fixes here yada 
I wanted to swap my laptop running gnome to KDE to match my desktop. My first mistake is I installed gnome/gdm without actviating KDE, then tried to fix and accidentally used pacman and yaya as root in chmod. I fixed my install with systemd-nspawn, but ive just been overwriting the packages pacman hits manually and manually removing errors with yay (i know this is bad but I am not sure how I should resolve it). i suspect pipx or python-conda or something got installed as root via yay or pip. My paths will not load, I get command not found errors on basic commands until I use “export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin”
I have some timeshift snapshots from before things broke badly and the path stopped working, but not from before I made the mistakes running yay and pacman as root with chmod. Everything is a mess in my file system and I am not sure how to clean it. What to do? I am willing to just try extracting all my personal files and installing fresh if it’s easier.
Thanks 
Welcome! 
Sounds like it really is a mess, so copying your personal data to an external drive and then reinstall (KDE) seems like a good idea.
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