I realise this is an old thread, but for anyone who has a similar problem and comes across this while browsing:
I had a very similar problem to this where I could not alter ANY system settings at all through the (Mint 19.3) System Settings GUI. As soon as I tried to change a dial box or slider etc, it would revert to the default immediately. I could not change the desktop wallpaper, font size or scaling, etc - which was a bit of a pain on my 4K laptop screen!
The Linux Mint machine in question was a VirtualBox guest virtual machine which I use for testing running under Windows 10 host. Just as I was logging into the VM, Windows decided to lock up completely (black screen crash), cause still unknown, so I had to power down.
After performing the usual chkdsk and sfc on the host machine, I booted the VM again only to discover the settings problems above. I had an earlier snapshot which I cloned so I could use it while I was troubleshooting the failed machine.
<aside>
Because I happened to have a document open on my host this crash also corrupted my LibreOffice settings which I eventually discovered in <home>\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user
</aside>
Suspecting system corruption of the VM, I tried using Timeshift to restore system files. This crashed in a number of interesting ways - Timeshift wouldn't work! After a few attempts, I booted into a Live ISO and used Timeshift to restore the desired backup, which worked perfectly. However, I still couldn't adjust any settings. This pointed to a user specific corruption.
So anyway, to come to the punch-line...
I created a new test user, and found that I could now alter settings normally. I logged out of the test user and did a dump of all files in the test user's home to a text document in my own Documents folder:
Code: Select all
# cd /home/test
# sudo ls -al -R 1> /home/<user>/Documents/test.txt
Parsing this into LibreOffice Calc allowed me to easily sort by time (I noted what time I was successfully adjusting the settings) and pointed me to this file:
Code: Select all
./.config/dconf:
total 12
drwx------ 2 test test 4096 Feb 5 19:40 .
-rw-r--r-- 1 test test 2803 Feb 5 19:40 user
So, back in my normal user home, I simply went to ~/.config/dconf/ and renamed the user file to user.OLD
As soon as I did this a new user file was created and I could now adjust settings normally!! Problem solved.
So, I hope this may help someone else who comes across this issue.
I should also offer props to Gnome Help which helped me understand what was going on.
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https://help.gnome.org/admin/system-adm ... es.html.en>