Skaperen blames Ubuntu

[Skaperen]

but then doing dpkg -l shows the package in its list. i am seeing packages not in the list

I think you do not see them there because they are part of the Ubuntu installation and are needed by installed programs.

If you delete all modules Ubuntu may not work properly anymore.

normally in ubuntu, even a freshly installed system has packages listed that dpkg -l will show. you can target an empty directory and install an ubuntu system and it will be just like what was installed from the ISO image. i have never done with ubuntu or debian (i have with fedora and slackware) but i have known 2 people who have (as part of building their own ubuntu based distro). i am tempted to do that just to have a reference copy since i think these problems i have been having are the result of a collision between something new in ubuntu and the goof-ups that have happened with pip that may be caused by ubuntu including some pypi packages (installed by apt-get then updated by pip). part of the problem is that i had not yet wrapped those commands in logging when i was adding and upgrading many packages in the early days of 16.04 so i have no idea about the true history. at least when i go to 20.04 in a couple years i will have those logging scripts that will record everything i do with all the package handling tools.

due to health issues and taking up work on cloud computing, i have abandoned building computers and custom installing distros. i chose ubuntu as my distro of choice. but some of that old thinking may have gotten in to this.

ubuntu should keep working as long as i don't delete anything installed by ubuntu packages. to help with making sure of that, i did get a list of all ubuntu package files (install the apt-file package which can get the list for you by doing sudo apt-file update and is a tool to extract the list by package name)