It's never late to shoot your self in the foot

Yesterday I decided to clean up some of the components I thought I didn't need on my Kubuntu laptop. Amongst the targets were the Apache httpd server and Mysql servers and clients. All went fine, but when I started the machine today KDE did not load. I tried rebooting but it did not help too. I couldn't remember how to connect the wireless from command line so I got wired connection to my router (later on I found this useful post that explains how to do it). In order to start Firefox and look for a solution to my problem I started a console, using Ctrl+Alt+F1, then exported the display with this command:

export DISPLAY=:0

Having done that, I launched Firefox by typing:

firefox &

on the command line. The ampersand is used in order to send the process to the background and keep the console usable.
Searching for KDE startup problems, I found the this post, explaining how to restart your KDE plasma desktop. I tried running "kstart plasma-desktop" and it gave me the following error:

"Application plasma-desktop could not be found using service org.kde.plasma-

desktop and path /MainApplication."

Searching for this message landed me on the KDE forum, where this post examined a similar problem.

After reading it for a while, I concluded that I am most likely missing the plasma-desktop for some reason, so I decided to reinstall it using:

sudo apt-get install plasma-desktop

While the reinstallation was executing I noticed that the MySQL server and client packages got installed again. It turned out that plasma needs MySQL to function and I have somehow confirmed the removal of plasma while removing MySQL.

After the reinstallation I rebooted from the command line and KDE Plasma started normally.

The takeaway from the story: Never do important reconfiguration without giving it a second thought and don't rely too much on the modern good looking Kubuntu tooling to save you from doing something stupid.