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I am a regular user of Ubuntu. I recently moved on from Ubuntu 19 for 20.04 LTS, but after the upgrade the settings are not opening. Besides the settings, the display settings and change background option are also not working.

Ollie
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Sayan Dutta
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    How do you try to open settings ? – Soren A May 10 '20 at 18:59
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    the answer from may 10 is the correct solution to your question,i managed to remove settings a couple of months back(i have not the faintest idea how i did it) and re installing controll center solved the problem.please accept the answer as it solves your problem. – trond hansen Jun 27 '20 at 15:21
  • sudo apt install pipewire – Burak May 07 '21 at 05:17
  • I checked gnome-control-center and got an error saying "bash: gnome-control-center: command not found" So, I ran the command sudo apt install gnome-control-center and it worked for me, – Aishwarya Patil Mar 23 '23 at 14:43
  • According to this discussion the error was caused by a version incompatibility with samba. For me, purging and reinstalling samba solved the issue: sudo apt-get purge samba samba-common and then sudo apt-get install samba – Jonas De Schouwer Aug 08 '23 at 10:09
  • It works on 2024-02-27 for my 20.04.4 LTS (Focal Fossa) from Jonas's solution of first sudo apt-get purge samba samba-common and then sudo apt-get install samba. After running, I can right click > settings > start properly. – etoricky Feb 17 '24 at 07:16

3 Answers3

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Your Gnome-Control-Center might need reinstalling. Open your terminal and enter these commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome-control-center

And then the commands for opening the display and system settings, respectively, would be:

gnome-control-center display
gnome-control-center

These commands will change the desktop background: First, get the URI of the background image:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri 'file:///home/yourusername/Pictures/yourpic.jpg'

Then set the background URI like so:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri 'file:///home/yourname/Pictures/yourpic.jpg'

And it will update your desktop background.

Best of luck!

Ollie
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    I had a very similar problem (though I didn't upgrade... seems this problem occurred after an update of 20.04). Anyway the reinstall didn't fix the problem but running "gnome-control-center display" forced the display window to appear. Now using the display settings menu selection works fine, (as does the "settings' menu selection... neither of which worked previously). – MER Dec 01 '20 at 04:49
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    @MER I didn't have gnome-control-center installed. I installed it and changed my background with it and my context menu for background, settings and display settings all started to work. So this gets my upvote. – Dean Feb 19 '21 at 17:52
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    Thank you, @Ollie! If only they'd hired you at Ubuntu. We wouldn't have to worry about things like that! :) – twigmac Mar 05 '21 at 07:23
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    Great answer, except that it didn't work. – Sephethus Jul 29 '21 at 13:38
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    I only reinstalled gnome-control-center and it worked, thanks. – King Of The Jungle Nov 27 '21 at 19:43
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    Just want to add that this works in Ubuntu 22.04 as well (where I had to install the package, not reinstall it). Also want to add that Ubuntu 22.04 is the worst Ubuntu since Ubuntu started, and you should not install it. I've warned you all.

    Take your well-deserved +1.

     – OmarOthman Mar 31 '22 at 11:01
  • Still works for Ubuntu 22.04. – user171780 Dec 29 '22 at 18:01
  • Still works on Ubuntu 20.04 – b264 Mar 06 '23 at 19:37
  • On Ubuntu 22.04 this generally worked to get settings to re-open, but also changed the settings theme to light and has fewer settings options than whatever came preinstalled. I think running sudo apt autoremove -y removed too many gnome packages. I ultimately used sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop-minimal to recover rather than just gnome-control-center. – ggorlen Jul 05 '23 at 06:45
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I had a similar problem where settings would not open after an upgrade. All the updates appeared to be installed, none of the above from Ollie worked. Eventually found it was a window/screen/display problem. Try pressing "shift + win + left arrow" or similar combinations to switch displays to where the settings app is open but not visible. Then you can try a single display - I found it was set to "join" which clearly didn't work.

Rogerg
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    my problem was the sudo apt install fuse... I have chosen N option to keep my conf settings and after that I couldn't see or open settings – lewis4u Jan 13 '23 at 09:49
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    @lewis4u how did you solve it ? – George Mar 07 '23 at 07:05
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    The problem is with fuse library on Ubuntu 22.04 You have to sudo apt purge fuse and then install sudo apt install libfuse2 and also sudo apt install gnome-control-center colord libgd3 – lewis4u Mar 12 '23 at 12:00
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It may be a long shot, but try removing MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i965 from /etc/environment.

Anna
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