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Cannot figure out how to get ubuntu desktop back to what it was before...

Problems:

  • Right click only brings up "Change Background...", "Display Settings", and "Settings". Before it would have a lot of options like like "create new file"...
  • Side bar missing. I can only see it when I click on the activities...
  • There is no Dock in the settings

What my desktop looks like

I would like to return desktop to its original state...

It used to look similar to this: enter image description here

I tried looking at:

Any help would be great thanks.

K7AAY
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Tim
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    @K7AAY I do not have Unity installed on my system. I tried Unity --reset it says unity is not installed. I looked it up and it looks like gnome is the default desktop for Ubuntu 18.04 which is what I have. – Tim Nov 04 '19 at 22:52
  • you said your Unity bar was missing https://imgur.com/a/WcsJvjy ; having a Unity bar suggests you are using Unity. In your question above you tagged both Unity and GNOME. If you were using GNOME, what was the result when you tried the suggestions in https://askubuntu.com/questions/56313/how-do-i-reset-gnome-to-the-defaults ? – K7AAY Nov 04 '19 at 22:52
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    I tried to do rm -rf .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity .cache .dbus .dmrc .mission-control .thumbnails ~/.config/dconf/user ~.compiz* No luck. Also, I changed the verbiage for clarification... – Tim Nov 04 '19 at 23:03

1 Answers1

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First, install GNOME Tweaks as recommended by https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/03/how-to-reset-gnome-desktop-settings-to.html and K. Monty; open a terminal, and run

sudo apt update && sudo apt install gnome-tweaks

then launch it, click on the upper panel at left on Tweaks, and choose Reset to Defaults. Then, logout and login again.

If that does not resolve the issue, then open a terminal and make a backup of dconf settings recursively with cp

md ~/dconf.bak && cp -r ~/.config/dconf/user ~/dconf.bak

Once the backup is made, tell dconf to reset to defaults

dconf reset -f /org/gnome/

Logout then login again. Check back with us if anything unusual occurs; we're here to help.

K7AAY
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