9

I have used ubuntu 20.04 since the day it was published and everything worked nice, but recently (I did not notice exactly when) GNOME Tweak Tool cannot be launched. I tried to remove --purge and reinstalling it but it did not help.

When I try opening it in the Terminal I get a strange response:

Failed to register: Timeout was reached
4
  • when I try opening it in the terminal I get a strange response: Failed to register: Timeout was reached May 2, 2020 at 16:18
  • 2
    From somewhere this was suggested killall gnome-tweaks, see if it makes any difference. May 2, 2020 at 16:23
  • surprisingly there was a process of gnome-tweaks in top output, and yes! it did work. thank you :) May 2, 2020 at 16:25
  • 1
    Please do not add "[SOLVED]" to the title. Ask Ubuntu is not like other forums. The right way to indicate you've found a working solution is by "accepting" the most helpful answer (by clicking the tick (✓) next to it) which you already did.
    – pomsky
    May 12, 2020 at 16:36

2 Answers 2

10

I used top to see the open processes and yes, there was a gnome-tweaks running.

So I used killall gnome-tweaks to close it, it did work and I now have my gnome-tweaks back

1
  • 1
    This solved my troubles on Ubuntu 20.04!
    – Lexible
    Jun 20, 2021 at 15:17
1

In my case I couldn't kill gnome-tweaks with killall, so I killed it by PID with kill.

After that, I started gnome-tweaks over the command line and it throwed an UnicodeDecodeError error. This seems to be a known issue. To fix that, you have to find out which file inside ~/.config/autostart is causing the error.

In my case the culprit was org.moson.matray.desktop and others reported vivaldi-stable.desktop. But probably you have to find that out on your own like this:

Move all files from ~/.config/autostart to another folder. gnome-tweaks should start now. To find the culprit, copy them back on by one and each time start gnome-tweaks, until it throws the error again. To fix it, remove that file or fix its encoding.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .