Not so recently, the command unity --reset was deprecated when Unity migrated its settings from gconf to gsettings. This happened in the 12.10 development cycle and as a result, there was no easy way to quickly reset the Unity configuration in 12.10 and later.

In order to fix that, we bundled a script with unity-tweak-tool which resets Unity configuration for you. The script utilizes gsettings API and is considered more secure than using dconf reset .

To use it, run the command

unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity

in a terminal. After doing so, log out and log back in again. You should hopefully have a Unity profile that was reset.

If in the unfortunate case you run into a bug or other anomaly, please consider filing a bug report against unity-tweak-tool on Launchpad. We will try our best to fix it for you.

For the attentive ones, it is in fact the same script that was posted on Ask Ubuntu. It should have made it into the Unity source code but we got lazy and Mir was announced; everything got thrown into the backburner and we took the easy way out and just rolled it into unity-tweak-tool.