I was playing around with the MATE Tweak tool and suddenly a stupid option removed all my panel applets and replaced with a default layout – that thing doesn't even confirm the destructive action first!
However, I do have a backup of my home folder in the old PC… What should I copy over to get my panel back? I tried looking for .mateconf
, .config/mate
or dconf/user
to no avail – both on my new and old computers the DConf Editor didn't show anything useful under org.mate.panel, only default stuff.
Best Answer
If you have backup of your dconf database file, which is usually in
~/.config/dconf/user
you can restore settings from that database. But some work needs to be done.Dconf reads database values from a profile file (See wiki here). And the path of that profile file is read from the
DCONF_PROFILE
environment variable.So, first create a file named
user2
in your home directory with content like thisPut your old dconf database file in
~/.config/dconf/
directory with nameuser2
. There should be a file with nameuser
already.Open a terminal and extract the settings from old database
This will dump the values from old dconf database in key-value format in
~/mate-old
file.Now load the settings back into the current database
This will restore most of the settings of mate.
Extra: If you want you can restore the whole database using
/
in place of/org/mate
. But I'm not recommending this.