Gnome 42 - How To Reset Current Theme To OOTB / Fresh Install Experience

Hello Everyone,

Just as the title says, how do I reset gnome themes to be like a fresh install (OOTB)? I was working on clearing up some orphans, caches, etc. and for some reason all my theme’ing I had previously got reset. Somehow I reset my dialog boxes for volume, brightness, and even my mouse pointer. I am trying to modify these but am unsure what settings control the look and feel of these settings. At this point, I just want to go to back to a fresh install experience and start my theme’ing adventure over from scratch.

Can anyone provide some steps or how to achieve this or how I can reset all the themes using the Gnome tweak tool possibly?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance to everyone for your time and help.

Is this a tutorial? :thinking:

Did you mean GNOME 43? :wink:

Please edit your topic title accordingly.

You keep using that word in different ways and I have no idea what you mean by it.

It sounds like you removed packages you shouldn’t have, but without knowing what you removed, I can’t tell you what to reinstall.

Check your Pacman log and look for the timeframe this may have happened.

grep -i removed /var/log/pacman.log

Apologies, let me give some more context and try to be clear. I am using Gnome 43.2 under Wayland and following some guidance in the post below I broke my system in terms of its appearance:

I mainly was trying to go through and follow the steps under the “System Maintenance” document, linked below for ease:

After completing this steps, somehow my custom theme that I had been using broke. Possibly during the step where I was removing the orphans.

Goal:
I want to ‘reset’ my theme settings as if I just did a fresh install of Manjaro. That way I can re-apply my specific theme configurations and maybe document what I did along the way. That way, if something happens in the future (or I do a fresh install) I can refer back and get things to look and feel how I like them to be.

Pacman Log:

If I can provide any additional information to help troubleshoot this issue around the themes / appearance, please let me know.

Thank you in advance for all of your time and help, it is greatly appreciated!

What custom theme?

[2022-12-17T00:04:22-0600] [ALPM] removed manjaro-gnome-extension-settings (20221211-2)

Reinstall manjaro-gnome-extension-settings, it will pull in the required dependencies you might have also removed. Check optional dependencies as well to suit your needs.

[2022-12-17T00:04:49-0600] [ALPM] removed qgnomeplatform-qt6 (0.9.0-5)

You’ll want both qgnomeplatform-qt6 and qgnomeplatform-qt5 if you want the default blue accent color in Qt applications.

If you want the new Maia theming, see:

Thanks @Yochanan, I got the following error:

sudo pacman -Syu manjaro-gnome-extension-settings     
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
 multilib is up to date
warning: manjaro-gnome-extension-settings-20221211-2 is up to date -- reinstalling
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (1) manjaro-gnome-extension-settings-20221211-2

Total Installed Size:  0.00 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:      0.00 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y
(1/1) checking keys in keyring                                                                            [###############################################################] 100%
(1/1) checking package integrity                                                                          [###############################################################] 100%
(1/1) loading package files                                                                               [###############################################################] 100%
(1/1) checking for file conflicts                                                                         [###############################################################] 100%
(1/1) checking available disk space                                                                       [###############################################################] 100%
:: Processing package changes...
(1/1) reinstalling manjaro-gnome-extension-settings                                                       [###############################################################] 100%
No schema files found: doing nothing.

(process:3175): dconf-WARNING **: 00:24:41.895: failed to commit changes to dconf: Error spawning command line “dbus-launch --autolaunch=5c166ed1c96d428789ce495bd8ade62d --binary-syntax --close-stderr”: Child process exited with code 1
:: Running post-transaction hooks...
(1/2) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...
(2/2) Compiling GSettings XML schema files...
en trying to install one of the packages you listed above:

Also got this output:
Imgur

Any thoughts would be super appreciated. Thank you!

That’s not full output. Please do not post screenshots of text. Copy and paste it here instead.

Output:

sudo pacman -Syu manjaro-gnome-extension-settings                                                                                                        
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
 multilib is up to date
warning: manjaro-gnome-extension-settings-20221211-2 is up to date -- reinstalling
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (1) manjaro-gnome-extension-settings-20221211-2

Total Installed Size:  0.00 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:      0.00 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y
(1/1) checking keys in keyring                                                                            [###############################################################] 100%
(1/1) checking package integrity                                                                          [###############################################################] 100%
(1/1) loading package files                                                                               [###############################################################] 100%
(1/1) checking for file conflicts                                                                         [###############################################################] 100%
(1/1) checking available disk space                                                                       [###############################################################] 100%
:: Processing package changes...
(1/1) reinstalling manjaro-gnome-extension-settings                                                       [###############################################################] 100%
No schema files found: doing nothing.

(process:3145): dconf-WARNING **: 14:52:20.145: failed to commit changes to dconf: Error spawning command line “dbus-launch --autolaunch=5c166ed1c96d428789ce495bd8ade62d --binary-syntax --close-stderr”: Child process exited with code 1
:: Running post-transaction hooks...
(1/2) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...
(2/2) Compiling GSettings XML schema files...

Besides that ‘reinstall’ error, I think everything is working. Thank you @Yochanan for helping get my system back up and running. I guess may more of a final curious question is why did these packages get marked as orphan’s if they are clearly needed (and I assume being used)?

Thanks again for all of your time and help, it is greatly appreciated!

You just pasted the same output you already have in the post above, not the output from the screenshot.

I’m glad you were able to figure it out. Thing is, you neither told us what you actually did to break it nor what you actually did to fix it.

I’m going to hide this topic as not to confuse others that may come across this post. It would really confuse them. No offense.

Sure, the solution was basically installing the packages your recommended and rebooting. But no offense, feel free to hide or delete it.

Thanks for the help!