uninstall borked my Ubuntu desktop

[jurobystricky]

I installed/uninstalled telemetrics-backend several times using ./deploy.sh on Ubuntu 16.04.
I noticed during (the first uninstall) there were some packages being removed that I thought was weird as I did not think were installed by telemetrics in the first place. First time I noticed something was wrong was when my Firefox desktop icon was replaced by a "generic" icon. After this, I decided to reboot the system only to find the desktop was completely missing. I *** think *** I fixed it from terminal cmd line:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

I did not see anything obviously wrong with the deploy.sh script, so this may not be reproducible.

[jurobystricky]

OK, so I took the bullet and ran ./deploy.sh -a uninstall on my restored desktop again.
Desktop ended up borked again. This is what I got:

Removing aisleriot (1:3.18.2-1ubuntu1) ...
Removing snapd (2.34.2) ...
Removing apparmor (2.10.95-0ubuntu2.10) ...
Removing apport-gtk (2.20.1-0ubuntu2.18) ...
Removing apport (2.20.1-0ubuntu2.18) ...
Removing ubuntu-desktop (1.361.2) ...
Removing language-selector-gnome (0.165.4) ...
Removing ubuntu-software (3.20.5-0ubuntu0.16.04.11) ...
Removing gnome-software (3.20.5-0ubuntu0.16.04.11) ...
Removing aptdaemon (1.1.1+bzr982-0ubuntu14) ...
Removing nautilus-share (0.7.3-2ubuntu1) ...

More details here:
deploy-uninistall.txt

I restored the desktop via terminal:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo service lightdm restart

but even after restoring the desktop there may still be some packages missing.