Have you made customizations to your GNOME desktop environment that you later regretted? Good news, you can easily reset GNOME to the defaults and restore all the original settings. In this tutorial, you will learn how to reset your GNOME Desktop Settings to Factory Default on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. The reset will put your desktop appearance and all settings, shortcuts, wallpapers and etc. to the factory default.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to Reset GNOME Desktop Settings to Factory Default
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish |
| Software | GNOME desktop environment |
| Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
| Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Reset GNOME Desktop Settings to Factory Default Ubuntu 22.04 step by step instructions
By resetting your GNOME desktop settings you will remove all current desktop configurations whether it be wallpapers, icon, shortcuts etc.
- Get started by opening a command line terminal.
- Next, to reset the GNOME settings to factory defaults execute the below command as a regular user:
$ dconf reset -f /org/gnome/
All done. Your GNOME desktop should now be reset.
Troubleshooting
In case you receive the following error message:
(dconf:3618): dconf-CRITICAL **: 08:25:26.282: unable to create directory '/run/user/0/dconf': Permission denied. dconf will not work properly. error: Could not connect: Permission denied
Make sure to run the GNOME reset command directly on your desktop via terminal. Execution of the reset dconf command remotely via ssh will result in the above error message.
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, you saw how to reset GNOME to its default factory settings on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. This is a handy trick to know in case you have made customizations to your desktop’s look and behavior that you later regretted and had trouble changing back. We showed a command line method in this tutorial so you won’t need to interact with your GUI to reset it, in case you have broken it beyond use.