How to recover lost customized desktop/ubuntu/gnome settings?

Question

My Ubuntu 20.04 system froze/crashed while trying to install anaconda, and after rebooting, I found that all my customized Ubuntu/Gnome/Desktop settings had been reset to the defaults. (Eg background screen image, the appearance of the files windows, the location and behavior of the status/menu bar, and a whole lot more besides.)

Does anyone know if there's any way these settings might be recovered?

Thanks!

Answer 1

So I'm now pretty sure that the crash/freeze during anaconda [re]installation was a symptom rather than a cause. There were a bunch of other symptoms/problems too. In addition to the ones listed above:

• Thumbdrives were seen by disks and lsusb, and could be mounted manually or by using disks, but they were no longer being mounted automatically.
• The trash icon would no longer appear on the desktop
• Trash wasn't working ('operation not permitted' or words to that effect)
• drag and drop from the shell folders to wine apps no longer worked, though files could still be loaded into the wine apps by using browse and then select.
• folders failed to remember the 'sort by 'preference
• Many, though not all, dconf settings were ignored, though some continued to work properly.
• Extensions were glitchy and unstable (eg changing settings had no effect; crashing on attempted updates)
• customized terminal profiles vanished
• desktop layout and icons wouldn't 'stick'

So anyway, all of the above issues were caused by an error in the dynamic link library configuration. Basically, the linker was configured to look in /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu before it was looking in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu. Consequently, for several libraries, it was finding and loading bad/broken user versions instead of the proper, correct system defaults.

Check if your system is doing the same with the following command:

$ ldd /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gio/modules/libdconfsettings.so

More details on this diagnostic and the way to then fix the problem can be found at these links:

• https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=244360&start=20

• My dconf/gsettings installation is broken. How can I fix it without Ubuntu reinstall?

I was going crazy with these issues and these guys saved me!

(I will just add that in addition to using sudo mv to rename the libc.conf file, I also had to edit one of the other .conf files to demote /usr/local/lib/ from being the first place to look to being the last place to look.)