Custom default values for system settings

System-wide default settings can be set by providing a default for a key in a dconf profile. These defaults can be overridden by the user.

Set a default value

To set a default for a key, the user profile must exist and the value for the key must be added to a dconf database.

Jeremy Bicha

You don't have to use "local" as the profile name. You can even have different profiles for different users. This isn't mentioned because this functionality needs something like accountsservice integration to enforce this. gnome-control-center integration would be great too.

An example setting the default background

Create the user profile:

<file>/etc/dconf/profile/user</file>


user-db:user
system-db:local

local is the name of a dconf database.

Create a keyfile for the local database which contains the default settings:

<file>/etc/dconf/db/local.d/01-background</file>


# dconf path
[org/gnome/desktop/background]

# dconf key names and their corresponding values
picture-uri='file:///usr/local/share/backgrounds/wallpaper.jpg'
picture-options='scaled'
primary-color='000000'
secondary-color='FFFFFF'

When the user profile is created or changed, the user will need to log out and log in again before the changes will be applied.

If you want to avoid creating the user profile, you can use the dconf command-line utility to read and write individual values or entire directories from and to a dconf database. For more information, see the dconf(1) man page.