Ubuntu – Ubuntu 16.04 – Unity doesn’t load – no Launcher or Dash appears

16.04launcherunityunity-dash

UPDATE: None of the provided answer to this date (2017.10.16) have helped me solve the problem, so in a fair world no one should get the bounty. I should emphasis that the provided answer were either not in the direction of answering the question (like those who suggested installing Gnome) or their suggestion didn't work on the computer that I have this issue on. Nevertheless i appreciate the time and effort they have put into this.

This might look like a duplicate post but IT'S NOT since none of the suggestions and solutions in other posts worked in my case.

Problem description:
Everything was going fine but I faces some sort of lags, so I rebooted the computer and after logging in to my account, Unity didn't load properly. I rebooted multiple times and … Nothing.

What I did:
I tried all the solutions and suggestion out there an none of the solutions out there worked. Things like:

the top 10 suggestions here:
Unity doesn't load, no Launcher, no Dash appears

or

unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity

or

unity --reset-icons

or

unity --reset

or

gconftool --shutdown
sudo killall -r -I gconf
sudo killall -r -I dconf
rm -rf .compiz* .gconf* .config/dconf/ .config/compiz*

My Idea and question:
Based on a suggestion of my friend, I tried to login with another user and it worked! everything was fine, which narrowed down that some settings in my account is corrupted!

The question is, Which files should I transfer from the other account that Unity works fine on to my own account?

When I try to run Unity from terminal I get the following:

$unity
unity-panel-service stop/waiting
unity7 stop/waiting
unity-panel-service start/running, process 6549
unity7 start/running, process 6648

Best Answer

Assuming you can access the terminal, have you considered downloading and switching to another desktop environment? Recently I had a very similar problem with compiz/unity and the only solution was switching to GNOME 3. If you don't really care that much about the GUI, maybe that's the way to go.

So you can access your account and you can log into other accounts without any problem. I'm just guessing but maybe it's worth a try.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop

By the way, It can be a great moment to getting to know GNOME because the next LTS Ubuntu release will have it as default, from what I've heard.