I've tried restarting the computer but it still remains corrupted. I have no idea how to navigate through settings beyond the icons - it garbles up my password too, it still works, but the text is corrupted on my screen for all system settings and when listing folders, desktop icons seem to be okay still:
edit 1: Swapping between light mode and dark mode did fix my notifications window and the basic wifi-settings portion!, still broken settings and folder view though :(
Jeez... WHAT A RIDE! okay this is how I fixed it:
After failing to use chatGPT which suggested to rollback using the upgrade entry for /var/log/apt/history.log (which was a good suggestion but the versions I upgraded from didn't work in the string I tried), I did some research and found this identical issue on the web:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/2389
Pretty much a couple users said that using gnome-tweaks (sudo apt install gnome-tweaks), they set the font scaling (first icon, then scroll to the bottom (since the text is still garbled) to a different size and that remedied their issue. Sure enough that also worked for me as well, but not consistently, I had to adjust it any time I opened a file explorer window or the settings (ridiculous and not a good solution).
I tried enabling Ubuntu Pro, thinking perhaps there were other dependencies not considered essential that were breaking things. Update, restart, no resolve.
Then I started over and googled, How to roll back mesa driver (My personal setup [named Timmy] is a retired gpu rig with 3x r4 vega so it has the mesa drivers in it) As you recall from step 1 I had a list of the updates that went forward and it included a bunch of libmesa drivers, so I wanted to simply roll those back. Which lead me to this other question:
Reinstall MESA driver
Voila! Their approach was to install ppa-purge (sudo apt install ppa-purge) and to use apt-cache policy mesa-va-drivers | grep -C2 Version to validate first. Sure enough I too had the oibaf versions of the driver installed. Thus I also followed the same command: sudo ppa-purge ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers, restarted Timmy, and it works!:
