Situatie
Need to go to factory settings on your Ubuntu system but don’t want to lose important data? The dconf tool is what you’re looking for. It will reset Ubuntu back to what it was when you first installed it without intervening with other files.
Solutie
Creating a Backup
You need to create a backup of your current settings first before trying to restore the previous state in case something goes wrong. There are many ways to create a backup on Linux. For this guide, I’m going to stick to dconf for desktop configuration settings. First, open your terminal and run the command below:
dconf dump / > ~/dconf-backup
This creates a backup named “dconf-backup” in your home directory, which contains all your system settings. If you want to create a backup of only specific settings, that’s also possible. For example, you may only want to save the desktop environment settings. In that case, pass the directory that contains those settings to the dconf command, like this:
dconf dump /org/gnome/ > ~/gnome-settings-backup
After taking the backup, you can verify it by inspecting the contents of the backup file to ensure the data was successfully saved. For that, run:
cat ~/dconf-backup
Once you’ve done that, make sure to save a copy of the backup file to an external drive or cloud storage to ensure it’s safe in case anything goes wrong during the reset process.
Resetting Ubuntu to Default Settings
With the backup ready, let’s now reset the Ubuntu settings. To simply reset all application and desktop environment settings, run this command in your terminal:
dconf reset -f /
This command cleans all user-specific settings in the dconf database. It resets configurations for GNOME and other apps that use dconf for storing settings. After this, your desktop should return to the default state. The more customizations you have, the easier you’ll notice the changes.
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