So, this morning, I thought I’d fix this by opening a fresh Terminal and change from base environment to FEniCS using
conda activate fenicsproject
then within it I tried
conda update spyder
and got this error:
so I thought, well, let’s just reinstall all of Spyder, not just the kernels… and I got all the “incompatible” errors that this guy did, plus extras because I have up to Python 3.9
To top it all off, the version of Spyder (3.3.6) that I opened from the applications menu on my Linux machine (that was working yesterday) is now back to THE SAME ERROR.
I checked that I set the interpreter to /home/kristin/anaconda3/envs/fenicsproject/bin/python, and it still showed the same error; I looked in the System Monitor (that’s what my machine calls the Task Manager) all the python3.8 processes are coming from /usr/bin/python3.8 and the Spyder process is coming from /usr/bin/python3.8 /usr/bin/spyder3
I also (obviously) don’t know how Anaconda is supposed to work, but even rebooting and launching Spyder from the Terminal (after activating fenicsproject) instead of from the App icon, I get the notice that
Attribute Qt::AA_UseSoftwareOpenGL must be set before QCoreApplication is created.
and then it open Spyder3 and shows the same console error wanting kernels. 
So I close Spyder, go back to the Terminal and entered the requested conda install spyder-kernels=0.* and get this:
I agree with 
from the Github advice, I ran
conda search fenics --channel conda-forge
and got the Name, Version, Build and channel, but IDK what to do with this.