My Ubuntu 20.04 system has been running very smoothly for quite awhile and then all of a sudden my Firefox won't work anymore and my Libreoffice won't work anymore and when I try to use the dpkg command I get the following error:

What kind of troubleshooting commands can I do?

Exactly what dpkg command did you use to get that message and what prompted you to use that command?

What does Firefox and Libre Office "won't work" mean? I expect you will have to be more specific than "won't work" if you expect to gs?et any help. Have any recent changes been made to either/both programs?

I didn't make any changes. I do remember that recently all of my bash command history disappeared. Then a few days later my Firefox just keeps crashing. It was working fine and now it launches and then immediately crashes. Libreoffice was working also, but now it won't even launch. I honestly did not make any changes to anything. My system was running like a top and then "out of the blue" there are major problems.

I can reinstall from a usb drive, but I'd rather not unless it is a last resort. I don't want to lose my xfce panels and all of my system customizations.

Here is the dpkg command I ran:

I was trying to install WPS Office as a substitute for Libreoffice.

Another symptom is that my Screenshot doesn't work either.

I'm not sure what you mean by: dpkg - package manager for Debian

I think you may have a hardware problem.... Either your OS drive is going, or maybe your memory isn't working well any more. I don't think you can blame it on Ubuntu when you start seeing multiple problems like that. I have several systems running 20.04 LTS and all are performing at expected. All are up to date with patches.

You are right. It's a bad drive. Closing thread.