Bring up networking manually?

Or just back up your files and reinstall.

ip a (shows network interfaces and ips

ip a a 192.168.<subnet>.<unused ip>/24 dev <interface> (get the subnet from your router or phone WiFi settings, interface is the interface starting with "en" from the first command, for unused ip just try your phone IP +1)

ip r a default via <router IP> (router IP can be seen in your phones WiFi settings under gateway)

That sounds pretty bad and probably means other things are broken too. The easiest option would probably be a reinstall at this point, but if you want to learn something you can also try to salvage your install.

To recover, it's probably easiest to manually configure your Ethernet connection as described by InnerScientist and then re-install the network-manager package.

You can check the status of the network-manager package using dpgk. It should look like this (ii at the start, but it sounds like it's not installed in your case):

$ dpkg -l | grep -i network-manager
ii  network-manager                         1.52.1-1                        amd64        network management framework (daemon and userspace tools)
ii  network-manager-l10n                    1.52.1-1                        all          network management framework (translation files)

I performed the upgrade in two steps apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs and apt full-upgrade (based on the release notes). I can see the following on the line Upgrade: for the command apt full-upgrade:

network-manager:amd64 (1.42.4-1+deb12u1, 1.52.1-1)

but what worked was what IHave69XiBucks proposed.

Why do I not see his comment?

AFAIK, you don't. You might be able to validate the actual software package's hash against official sources, but the crack won't validate because it's different from the unedited files.

That's why picking a site and uploader you know is important. You're kind of just hoping for the best.

What about installing some antivirus than can scan on demand?

I don't know how's the "market" right now, but a few years ago Malwarebytes was good for Windows, and ClamAV in Linux

Literally everything.

Okay not everything, I'm sure they share some basic libraries like openssl. But the core OS is apples and oranges.

I think its easier and shorter to say what is the same between the two than different, but some things that are different:

1. Filesystem (ex. Linux treats everything as a file, more flexibility in organization, more compatibility for differing systems, etc)
2. Security Model (NTFS vs UNIX, selinux, ACLs, etc)
3. File Execution (File extensions don't really matter in Linux - based on file permission not extension, ELF vs PE, etc)
4. Kernel (Monolithic vs Hybrid kernel systems - Windows hands off to HAL vs the Linux kernel doing core functions)
5. System Calls (Windows use Win32/NT APIs, Linux uses POSIX-compliant)

Performance is dependent on use case, but in general:
1. Linux uses fewer system resources
2. Linux has faster boot time
3. Linux has better CPU/disk throughput
4. Windows has better gaming driver support
5. Linux has higher stability/control (hence why its the defacto server OS)

If we stripped all ms's junk out and made windows open source, would we still prefer linux?

In what context? For gaming maybe, but that's one single use. There is more to computers than video games, at least for the majority of Linux users.
I wouldn't trust Windows on any server I run.

At a super basic level, MacOS, Linux, and Windows all use different kernels.

From a very basic viewpoint. The kernel is basically the piece of software that gives each piece of hardware their instructions.

At the absolute most basic level, assuming equal hardware, all the kernels are working with same set of instructions(store this value in this register, move to this location in the stack, read this value, etc) but they issue those instructions in different orders to achieve very different results.

The NT kernel that windows uses does basically everything in a different way than the Linux kernel. To the point that their only real similarities are that they speak the same language to the bare metal hardware.

The licensing: Free and open source vs. paid, proprietary, and closed source. That really is the core difference, the licensing, and all the differences that come as consequences of that difference.

What separates the Linux kernel from the (Free)BSD kernels is copyleft/reciprocal licensing vs. permissive licensing.

Somewhat of a cheap answer, but I feel what illustrates the difference quite well is that Linux follows the design from UNIX, which was a research project with stupid amounts of money to at least try to get things right. On the other hand, Windows originated from an OS, which was referred to by its developers as "Quick and Dirty Operating System".

And I do feel like these foundations have informed the design of all the layers built on top.

From my basic understanding: Windows has a microkernel hybrid style architecture. It's kind of like microservices. Instead of all resources being shared within a system process, You get a lot of tiny services all making calls to each other and the main kernel.

This introduces a lot of overhead because variables need to be sent and requested between processes. And they don't simply share them in the same memory.

Linux on the other hand has most services under one monolithic kernel and they can all access the same memory. So there is no need for all of that intercommunication between services.

At least that's my basic understanding and if I'm wrong (which I probably am), then somebody on the internet will now correct me.

They come from completely different heritages.

GNU/Linux is a reimplementation of Unix, an operating system that was originally designed mainly for universities, but also mainframes.

Windows is descended from DOS, an operating system intended for home computers.

Nowadays Windows is the only widely used non-Unix-like OS; GNU/Linux, Android, macOS and iOS are all Unix-like.

If Windows became FOSS, I at least would likely switch to it. It's really the FOSS philosophy more than anything else that makes me want to use GNU/Linux.