How to fix or reinstall malfunctioning GNOME without reinstalling entire OS?

Piotrek

6/18/24, 12:26 PM

I've got an Ubuntu 23.04 installed on my laptop, with the default desktop environment being GNOME. Some time ago I started experimenting with other desktop environments like KDE. When I got back to using GNOME, it turned out many things on GNOME is broken:

some icons in the menu looks different
I cannot lock the screen using keyboard shortcut (despite it being properly specified in settings).
locking it using mouse (using icon in the menu on top bar) seems to be broken too. I need to do this twice; first time just make a screen darker without actually locking screen
lock screen was replaced by KDE. I want it to look like it was before

How can I bring back GNOME to the state it was before? I don't want to reinstall entire OS, just get GNOME to its defaults.

What I've already tried:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-shell
sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome-shell

I've also used:

sudo apt-get remove gnome-shell

to remove gnome-shell and then I've installed it again, but what I've got as a result is GNOME without Ubuntu tweaks (like taskbar on the left) which is not what I wanted. I'm looking for a way to bring back GNOME version that is shipped with OS installation.

Also, removing and installing gnome-shell again hasn't fixed my login screen (it's still how KDE set it up).

145

0 + 2

gnome

23.04

Archisman Panigrahi

6/18/24, 2:44 PM

It seems that you need to remove the KDE applications, and not the GNOME ones. You can [find the KDE apps you installed](https://askubuntu.com/a/21658/124466). Remove all of them, and reinstall the package `ubuntu-desktop`.

makbeta

8/2/24, 3:37 AM

Thanks @Archisman Panigrani, I had a similar issue. Reinstalling `ubuntu-desktop`, per your advice, helped me restore my Gnome visual desktop.

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EN: How to fix or reinstall malfunctioning GNOME without reinstalling entire OS?

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