Winterland has a support thread going of the same title. I find the topic interesting, in particular the typo theory suggested by AI1000, which I have some comments on. Rather than clog up Winterland's support thread, I thought I'd start a parallel discussion thread, to further discuss some of the things being mentioned, without detracting from those helping Winterland get his system back to normal.
------------------------------------------------------
Winterland says the RM command he ran deleted non-Wine things from his home folder, and triggered a permission error.
when I tried to run the next line, I received a message that read, "you don't have permissions for that" so I [...] skipped ahead to the "sudo apt-get remove -purge wine"
nothing appeared to happen...until I closed my browser and then noticed my desktop was missing. Checked my files and *poof* everything is gone. Photos, Music, Videos, Downloads, Documents.-REF:https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/641669/attempted-to-purged-wine-on-mint-and-now/#entry4196430
rm -rf $HOME/.wine-REF:http://sourcedigit.com/14942-completely-remove-wine-linux-ubuntu-systems/
AI1000 suggested a typo might be the cause.
The problem with rm commands is that typing just one incorrect character has the potential to do a lot of damage-REF:https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/641669/attempted-to-purged-wine-on-mint-and-now/#entry4196535
I agree a typo could be a valid cause. In particular, a space between "$HOME/" and ".wine". This would result in ".wine" being dropped from the command. Instead, the command would attempt to delete the user's entire home folder, recursively. A few items (eg: the "Desktop" folder, and "." and ".." links) would fail to delete, as well as the user's home folder itself, which would trigger a permission error stating that you cannot delete it, but everything else, including personal files, and program config files, would be gone.