sudo gsettings May Change the Wrong User’s GNOME Proxy

For your own GNOME desktop, run the setting change as its user from that desktop session:

gsettings get org.gnome.system.proxy mode
gsettings set org.gnome.system.proxy mode 'manual'

This illustrates the context, not a complete proxy configuration; endpoint and bypass values must also be correct. For a manual SOCKS route, set the host and port as well as the mode. Read the value back in the same intended session.

Running the command with sudo does not select that user's settings. GSettings operates through a backend context. With dconf, the user database and session bus matter; the command-line manual requires a D-Bus session-bus connection for writes to that backend.

For an administrative change, use the supported desktop-management or user-session mechanism. Switching UID in another shell may still lack the intended settings environment, and copying variables from an arbitrary matching process can target another login on a multi-session machine.

If readback is correct but routing is unchanged, identify the application's consumer interface. A live GSettings listener can receive notifications. An application that copied http_proxy at startup does not receive a new environment when dconf changes, and its private proxy policy may select another route. Repeating the write as root does not resolve that consumer mismatch.