Where are the dconf profiles?

Question

The dconf System Administrator Guide says that "dconf stores its profiles in text files in /etc/dconf/profile/" but on my 11.10 Ubuntu laptop, there is no /etc/dconf directory.

Have profiles been deprecated or where are they now?

Answer 1

You are not confused about which dconf you are using.

dconf takes the approach that, in the default configuration, there should be no files in /etc/. You only add files there if you want to make changes to the default configuration. For that reason it's true that /etc/dconf/ doesn't exist by default. You need to create it and populate it according to the documentation on that wiki page in order to setup profiles.

You can indicate a dconf profile in another directory. For example:

export DCONF_PROFILE=/home/user/mydconfprofile