uninstalling an old version

[Bob Tennent]

 >|    Then rm -rf texlive/2019 removed too much, leaving me
 >|    with a broken system.
 >|
 >|Bob, what do you mean here? That removal shouldn't affect
 >|anything except TL'19. It's always worked for me.

Might tlmgr remove --all or the above have removed the
symlinks in /usr/local/bin? That would have seemed like a
"broken" system; the binaries were there but not accessible.
When I re-installed, install-tl pointed out to me that in
that xterm, TEXMFVAR=~/.texlive2019/texmf-var; i.e., it
hadn't been updated since I'd started to use the pretest.
Perhaps the 2019 bin directory was still in the PATH.

Well after re-installing, all is well again.

Bob