Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Dock Customization is not working

Question

I had cloned my hard disk which has Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to a new hard disk using

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=blocksize

command. Everything works fine with the cloned hard disk. I can boot the system using cloned hard disk to Ubuntu. However, there is one problem. My desktop customization for gnome is no longer honored. In my original hard disk, I had different wallpaper, taskbar/launcher was on the bottom. In the ubuntu booted from cloned hard disk, I can only see the default desktop appearance. I cannot pin a new app to the launcher/taskbar and it is on the left side which is by default. It seems something is read-only and I cannot understand what. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks.

Update: I just found out that in my nautilus, Ctrl-H to show hidden files and folders is also not working.

Answer 1

@Gryu and I had a discussion about what could wrong with this. We tried several things. However, what fixed was accepted answer from How to fix Unity locked disabled settings? even though Ubuntu 18.04 doesn't have Unity.

I typed the command:

mv ~/.config/dconf/ ~/.config/dconf.bak

and all the lock were disabled upon reboot, I was able to change the background, change the location of the taskbar, etc.

I investigated on what had happened in the midst of this problem. It looks cloning the disk copies everything bit by bit but user id is changed.

These three questions helped me: How to migrate user settings and data to new machine?

Problem after cloning disk

How to fix Unity locked disabled settings?

I also later tried to diff backed up dconf and newly generated one after rebooting, and it looks like this:

It means something may have remained from the original disk which may have caused some kind of checksum to fail (not sure about technical details here). I hope this helps others as well.