How do I completely clean-up or reset a Python installation on Ubuntu

Question

Package management and juggling pip, anaconda, PPAs, and virtual-environments is difficult. Somewhere in my constellation of dependencies, things are broken. I'm on Ubuntu 18.04. As far as I know, I cannot fix these dependencies by hand.

The problem, for what it's worth: I've been unable to use tensorflow for a few months. Every time I try to fix it, even uninstalling and reinstalling everything to the best of my knowledge, things still don't work. After sinking enough hours, I'm looking for a "nuclear solution".

What I would like to do is cleanly remove everything except Python and any Python packages my system might require, so that I can start fresh (and hopefully do things properly.)

So, my question: How can I systematically clean up or remove my Python installation? I want to wipe everything and start anew. Does there exist a systematic guide, or a smart and reputable script that does this?

Answer 1

Helpful and cautionary tale, be a good idea not to delete it I think... I'll assume it was the profanity that got it deleted so I've edited it out.

!!!! WARNING !!!!

If you're like me and you think ah shur I'll do an 'apt list --installed | grep -i python' and then 'apt purge -y' all that crap, well, maybe don't.

Now my entire system is doo-doo. It all seemed fine until I rebooted and now there is no network connection, netplan and a bunch of other stuff is just gone. No recovery possible.

Actually it looks like it was an 'apt autoremove' AFTER I'd done the above that actually removed netplan.

And all because I wanted to remove multiple python versions to get over those gosh darn import issues and messin' around with pip and pip3 and pip3432432 and what gosh flippin' version of python is tied to what oody doody version of pip...

UPDATE - This video helped me recover me files https://youtu.be/tGIPeWkPkMc