Made by nerds for nerds

Yesterday my daughter accidentally wiped out the Ubuntu partition from my ChromeBook. So I had to download it again, and I'm now reinstalling it. Here is the sort of nonsense one encounters while setting up the system: when I finally booted Ubuntu, a dialog box comes up that reads as follows:

"Welcome to the first start of the panel
Choose below which set up you want for the first startup.
Use default config
One empty panel"

So, in my 30th year of being fairly to heavily involved in the computer world, I really only understand "Use default config" from this dialogue. What the heck is "The first start of the panel"? What in the world will happen if I choose "One empty panel"?

Curious, I tried choosing the second. I booted into a screen with some disc icons and... one empty panel on it! It is a little gray rectangle. I can drag it around the screen. What else I can do with it I have no idea. There is no menu bar at the top, and no application launcher at the bottom.

And here is the real kicker: I cannot find a clue anywhere about how to get back to the "default config." I have probed the various preference and setting menus: nothing.

After a half hour of trying to figure out how to get a desktop from which I could actually do some work, I finally simply reinstalled Ubuntu.