How do I reset my Unity configuration?

The following command does not work on newer distributions (as the reply is ERROR: the reset option is now deprecated).

For 12.04 and older

The simplest way is to hit "open a Terminal" or hit Alt-F2 and run the command:

unity --reset

For 12.10 - 13.04

I, along with jokerdino and amithkk have created a python script that cleanly resets Unity for Quantal and above.

It is hosted on github at https://github.com/phanimahesh/unity-revamp

The script is now bundled with Unity Tweak Tool. You can install it using

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freyja-dev/unity-tweak-tool-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

For 13.10 & 14.04

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

To reset Unity, do

unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity

Note - if this does not resolve your Unity issues then the following Q&A may apply to you:

  • How do I reset GNOME to the defaults?

What happens behind the scenes?

Simple. We chase each individual setting that Unity uses, and reset them to their default values, and then reload unity to apply changes. Ah yes, we also kill Unity and compiz before we start, since it is known to get tricky if we change settings under compiz's nose.

Why is this better compared to using dconf-editor or dconf reset ?

  • Didier Roche (didrocks), the author of unity python wrapper says dconf reset does not work in all cases.
  • The consensus among Unity developers is that the settings be modified using Gsettings instead of dconf directly.

What exactly is dconf ?

A little history

  • The configuration settings were managed by gconf earlier.
  • Gnome provides Gsettings as a replacement for gconf.
  • Gsettings is a high level api that manipulates the settings stored in a backend.
  • Unity stores its settings in the backend dconf since it can be loaded much faster than gconf.

As Kees said, running unity --reset will reset all of the launcher options, but it won't remove your custom favorites. To also remove any launchers you've added to the launcher, run 

unity --reset-icons

Or manually by: 

gsettings reset com.canonical.Unity.Launcher favorites

I would recommend running the gsettings command before unity --reset, so that you won't have to restart unity for the gsettings key reset to take effect.

Tags:

Unity

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