Screen tearing and now "locked out" from attempting to troubleshoot

[Aravisian]

@EnriqueTMT

I still have the tearing.

I thought you had the tearing all along?

@EnriqueTMT

but still a little annoying.

Very annoying in my book... I made a thread on here in Tutorials about Restoring lost applications...
Ah, found it. Not that it helps you now...

[HOW TO] Easily reinstall programs when Reinstalling Zorin

Sometimes, bad things happen even to good people. Maybe it was a power outage or some spilled coffee... But whatever it was, you now must wipe and reinstall Zorin OS. What makes this particularly daunting is all your software you have installed must now be reinstalled. (EDIT: I am removing the script option as some report they work and some report they do not work. Y-PPA-Manager is a lot easier and works every time.) You can use Y PPA Manager GUI tool to back up your current repositories. Ru…

@EnriqueTMT

Because I'm thinking of just removing the operating system completly. How would I do that?

Any OS removal is simply done by installing any new OS over it. Overwriting it that way.
You can use a partition manager to delete the partition that the OS resides on, then format that freed up space by adding that free space as a partition. Doing this will leave the computer without any OS.