Some packages and files of KDE Plasma still remain. The icons of apps in GNOME are those of Plasma, even the busy cursor icon has changed. The splash screen and the theme of the system still remain changed. How should I reset my Ubuntu GNOME to its defaults? Did I even completely remove KDE Plasma? Thanks.
I am not aware of any UI to perform “reset to default settings” for the whole GNOME desktop and its applications.
Sledgehammer approach is to boot into multi-user.target and delete ~/.config and ~/.cache directories. This should remove most custom settings (unless you have some outliers still not using ~/.config like Firefox or Thunderbird). Beware that Chromium does store its profile under ~/.config though.
Less intrusive is to boot into multi-user.target and delete ~/.config/dconf directory. That is where most GNOME applications keep custom settings. Again, there could be other applications using GSettings API as well, so it may affect a bit more than just GNOME.
The most fine grained approach is to use gsettings reset-recursively, but it needs to be done for each schema and on my Ubuntu 24.04 there are 296 schemas with org.gnome. prefix which makes it rather tedious.
As for boot splash screen. It is shown by Plymouth and the default theme to use is set by the default.plymouth alternative:
bor@bor-Standard-PC-Q35-ICH9-2009:~$ update-alternatives --display default.plymouth
default.plymouth - auto mode
link best version is /usr/share/plymouth/themes/kubuntu-logo/kubuntu-logo.plymouth
link currently points to /usr/share/plymouth/themes/kubuntu-logo/kubuntu-logo.plymouth
link default.plymouth is /usr/share/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth
slave default.plymouth.grub is /usr/share/plymouth/themes/default.grub
/usr/share/plymouth/themes/bgrt/bgrt.plymouth - priority 110
/usr/share/plymouth/themes/kubuntu-logo/kubuntu-logo.plymouth - priority 150
slave default.plymouth.grub: /usr/share/plymouth/themes/kubuntu-logo/kubuntu-logo.grub
bor@bor-Standard-PC-Q35-ICH9-2009:~$
The KDE splash screen is provided by the plymouth-theme-kubuntu-logo package. Check if this package is still installed and what default Plymouth theme is configured. If this theme is not KDE anymore, you need to rebuild initrd because the Plymouth is started there and it is still using the theme that was copied into initrd when it was built.
sudo update-initramfs -u
(although 26.04 switched to dracut, this command still works).
Sorry for my delayed response. I went with your second approach, and it worked. I booted into multi-user.target and deleted the ~/.config/dconf directory. Furthermore, I changed the Plymouth too. My GNOME got reset to its defaults.
I have a few questions.
I had installed Proton VPN through a .deb package earlier before switching to GNOME. But after deleting the ~/.config/dconf directory, the application seems to have been deleted. Why did this happen?
There are many unknown apps installed (like Rhythmbox, Synaptic Package Manager, etc.). Are they remnants from the KDE Plasma installation? Should I remove them manually?
I executed many commands to trying to remove the packages and config files. Many of the commands that I executed were for older Ubuntu installations, and also they
were scattered from different sources. My system works fine right now, but should I worry about how it may have affected the system?
Most VPNs are just some configuration for OpenVPN. If that’s the case for Proton, then Gnome might have stored that configuration in dconf …
Check apt-cache rdepends synaptic and apt-cache rdepends rhythmbox. AFAIK they are both installed as dependencies of Gnome.
The command line changes much slower than the GUI. Many commands from more than a decade ago still do exactly the same thing as they used to do and in most cases were they don’t (e.g. names of packages in a command for uninstalling) they fail with obvious error messages and without doing anything else.
Deleting DCONF database does not delete any application(s). You need to explain where you are looking for this application, what you are doing. Paste the actual commands you used and their output or screenshot of the places where you are expecting your application together with the description why the command output or the information on screenshot is wrong.
Any facts that would allow others to understand what you were doing and expecting. Just saying “application seems to be deleted” is too vague to even start guessing.
Sorry for being unclear. I was unable to find the proton application when I tried to search for it in the search bar. Then I tried
>> protonvpn-app
Command 'protonvpn-app' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install proton-vpn-gtk-app
When I tried to find the package,
>> dpkg -l | grep proton
rc proton-vpn-daemon 0.13.8 all Proton VPN Daemon
ii protonvpn-stable-release 1.0.8 all Package to install ProtonVPN GPG key and stable repo
ii python3-proton-core 0.7.4 all ProtonVPN client core library (python3)
ii python3-proton-keyring-linux 0.2.3 all Python3 Proton linux keyring base implementation
rc python3-proton-vpn-api-core 5.5.11 amd64 Python3 ProtonVPN Core API
ii python3-proton-vpn-local-agent 1.6.3 amd64 Local Agent Python Module
I checked out the .log file, and there was not any mention of proton anywhere. When installing proton, I enabled the system tray icon, which isn’t supported by default. Will that have anything to do with this?
Also, as I said to you before, I executed many commands trying to remove Plasma completely and reset the GNOME configuration. They were for older installations and were from different sources. It may be due to those commands. Should I just reinstall the required package and not worry about it? Thanks.