After logging in to my account, I see no panels or anything else, only the background. I cannot even start a terminal with ctrl+alt+t. The only thing the system responds to is ctrl+alt+delete which shows the system monitor (without the top panel) or ctrl+alt+F1 to login by hand. However logging in to the guest session works fine.
When logging in by hand I cannot restart unity (unity –replace), this gives me:
unknown job: unity-panel-service
Without the graphics display open I cannot reset compiz and unity to default settings. Searching other questions I tried to move the .Xauthority in ~/ to some other place. Did not work. I also tried the sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop and sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity +rebooting. Also tried to reinstall lightdm. Nothing works.
I've been running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS just fine for quite some time and haven't recently done any changes besides installing updates.
Best Answer
So I finally managed to recover by doing the following
mv ~/.config/dconf/user ~/.config/dconf/user.oldThis makes me loose all my settings, but at least I can log in and now I can attempt at recovering at least some of the settings from the
user.oldfile.