Saving Cinnamon customizations

When I switched Desktop Environments towards Cinnamon, I wanted to save configuration settings so I could restore them later if I moved to a different PC.

Pre-requisites:

We need the following packages

• dconf

Optionally you may want to install:

• dconf-editor
• glib

The simplest way is to modify the settings using the built-in Cinnamon UI tools or cinnamon-settings. Once you have all the settings as you want run:

dconf dump / > customizations.ini

Or if you want to limit to cinnamon settings:

dconf dump /org/cinnamon/  > cinnamon.ini
dconf dump /org/gnome/ > gnome.ini

We need to dump cinnamon and gnome because cinnamon is gnome derived and some settings are stored there.

See the manpage for dconf for more details.

The result of these commands is a text file in INI format. Which can be edited with a text editor. I would normally edit the text file as it would contain some settings that I would prefer to leave as default.

When it is time to restore the settings you need to use the command:

dconf load / < customizations.ini

or

dconf load /org/cinnamon/  < cinnamon.ini
dconf load /org/gnome/ < gnome.ini

Modifying the INI file lets you access some settings not available directly from the GUI. To explore what is possible you can use the following commands:

gsettings list-schemas

or from the GUI:

dconf-editor