I shut down bitcoin-qt. When I started it again, it started with some bitcoin-25.99* version, and no wallet was loadable. It was only a node with peers, nothing else.
It sounds like you compiled it from source and did so without wallet support enabled. You probably didn't have the wallet dependencies installed in a way that the build could find them, so it didn't build the wallet component.
if you want to use bitcoind, it should already come with the bitcoin-qt that you already have. They are released together. Regardless, there is no difference between the functionality of bitcoind and bitcoin-qt, except that bitcoin-qt has a GUI. The RPCs all behave the same way.
What happens if you just wait longer for the migration to finish?
Nice. I tried bitcoind again. This time, I loaded it from the same folder as bitcoin-qt and gave it the same permission:
cd '/(localpath)/bitcoin-25.0/bin'
chmod +x bitcoind
./bitcoind
In another terminal I tried: bitcoin-cli getbalance
It returned a different error:
error code: -19
error message:
Wallet file not specified (must request wallet RPC through /wallet/<filename> uri-path).
Try adding "-rpcwallet=<filename>" option to bitcoin-cli command line.
So I did as instructed: bitcoin-cli -rpcwallet="" getbalance
It worked. I will write bitcoin-cli -rpcwallet="" from now on I guess.
I think I'm going to wait for more bugs get fixed and a migration button to be added to the UI before I do it. Thanks.