GNOME Tweak Tool does not open anymore

Question

I have used ubuntu 20.04 since the day it was published and everything worked nice, but recently (I did not notice exactly when) GNOME Tweak Tool cannot be launched. I tried to remove --purge and reinstalling it but it did not help.

When I try opening it in the Terminal I get a strange response:

Failed to register: Timeout was reached

when I try opening it in the terminal I get a strange response: Failed to register: Timeout was reached — Masoud Borbor, May 02 '20 at 16:18
From somewhere this was suggested killall gnome-tweaks, see if it makes any difference. — schrodingerscatcuriosity, May 02 '20 at 16:23
surprisingly there was a process of gnome-tweaks in top output, and yes! it did work. thank you :) — Masoud Borbor, May 02 '20 at 16:25
Please do not add "[SOLVED]" to the title. Ask Ubuntu is not like other forums. The right way to indicate you've found a working solution is by "accepting" the most helpful answer (by clicking the tick (✓) next to it) which you already did. — pomsky, May 12 '20 at 16:36

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited May 02 '20 at 16:29

10

I used top to see the open processes and yes, there was a gnome-tweaks running.

So I used killall gnome-tweaks to close it, it did work and I now have my gnome-tweaks back

edited May 02 '20 at 16:29

schrodingerscatcuriosity

4,246
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answered May 02 '20 at 16:28

Masoud Borbor

793

1

This solved my troubles on Ubuntu 20.04! – Lexible Jun 20 '21 at 15:17

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '22 at 20:27

In my case I couldn't kill gnome-tweaks with killall, so I killed it by PID with kill.

After that, I started gnome-tweaks over the command line and it throwed an UnicodeDecodeError error. This seems to be a known issue. To fix that, you have to find out which file inside ~/.config/autostart is causing the error.

In my case the culprit was org.moson.matray.desktop and others reported vivaldi-stable.desktop. But probably you have to find that out on your own like this:

Move all files from ~/.config/autostart to another folder. gnome-tweaks should start now. To find the culprit, copy them back on by one and each time start gnome-tweaks, until it throws the error again. To fix it, remove that file or fix its encoding.

GNOME Tweak Tool does not open anymore

2 Answers2