Ubuntu – Rebooting caused theme to look like Windows 95 or Gnome Classic

themesunity

My PC has recently received a fresh Ubuntu 13.04 install. There is nothing else on the PC apart from a very basic setup of 13.04.

After rebooting, I noticed so many problems with the way Ubuntu looked:

  • Mouse pointer very large, blurry
  • Applications don't have a global menu bar
  • Font is all weird… is it open sans instead of Ubuntu?
  • Right click context menu has little coloured icons in it
  • Most applications look like Windows 95

I've tried:

  • unity-revamp
  • unity –reset
  • changing the theme from Ambiance and back again
  • creating new user account (looks ok in other account, but switching back is the same)
  • removing custom themes directories (there were none at ~/.theme, ~/themes)
  • Installing proprietary drivers (this made everything much faster and smoother, but didn't fix the weird theme)

Here's some screenshots of what things look like now:

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Can someone help my Ubuntu get back to its beautiful self?

Best Answer

A colleague fixed this for me:

We basically went through all hidden directories within the home directory and moved them to a backup folder...

It was after removing ~/.gconf I noticed that everything, slowly, started fixing itself.

Once booted, I first noticed the font was back to the normal Ubuntu font, and then in front of my very eyes the global menu bar popped up to the top-bar, and then the colours popped magically back to life.

The last thing to fix itself, was the mouse pointer, which reduced in size as I was typing this answer.

As much as this fixed my problem, I really don't have a clue why this occurred, or what file within gconf was the culprit...