Restore GNOME desktop to original state

Question

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

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

It used to look similar to this:

I tried looking at:

• How to return back Ubuntu 18 default GNOME desktop?

• How do I reset GNOME to the defaults?. I tried rm -rf .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity .cache .dbus .dmrc .mission-control .thumbnails ~/.config/dconf/user ~.compiz

Any help would be great thanks.

Answer 1

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.