tina-otoge / gnome-sync

A tool to sync GNOME settings between devices

GNOME-sync

Syncs GNOME settings between multiple devices.

Rationale

If you search online, you'll find no existing solution to sync GNOME preferences between multiple devices.

The general, correct, advice is to use dconf load and dconf dump to export some keys from the GNOME settings database. However, it seems like nobody made a tool to simplify the process of exporting and loading the correct keys.

There are a LOT of settings stored in this database, and you don't want to sync most of them, such as the path of the last folder accessed in the Files app, your commands history, the position of the windows on the desktop, etc.

The common workflow if you ever attempted to sync your GNOME settings is to dump everything using dconf dump / on the source device, then look over each of the settings, remove the ones you don't want, and dconf load / < them on the target device.

I started having to do this process often, and thus started maintaining a text file with the actually relevant keys in it. Then I realized I could automate the process of dumping the configuration, and filtering out everything not present in the whitelist file. This is GNOME-sync.