Sometime we users (power users or curious users) get carried away when we are left alone and have some free time on our hands. Like to tinker with our computer, and Linux based OS in general is great for customization. But sometime these “customization” might not go right and best option would be to nuke and pave. I know elementary OS does this, will there be an option to have a button in Settings (for elementary it is under About System) to have Restore Defaults? When press it brings the user’s desktop settings back to defaults.
Yes, that and playing around with elementary OS in VM is what got me thinking that this neat feature would be great addition. Not just for Ubuntu but also GNOME if it is done and upstreamed.
This is a genuinely useful bit of info, but I’d like to add a couple of simple commands for the sake of reference - I’ve been doing this using Elementary for a while but I have tested this for Ubuntu 17.10 on metal and vm with success:
To save settings to a file: $ dconf dump / > "dconf_settings.txt"
To load settings from a file: $ dconf load / < "dconf_settings.txt"
No, not exactly.
It doesn’t wipe the system out if that’s what you mean.
It simply resets all the desktop changes you made back to the initial state.
So if you added or set some different theme or set static workspaces or things like that, those would be reset.
It won’t remove any files.
I think (I cannot remember as I am not currently on any gnome shell desktops) that it doesn’t remove any of your added extensions, but simply disables them. So you would need to turn them on again yourself.