Ubuntu 16.04.1 unity disappears when set to autohide

See also http://askubuntu.com/questions/802468/menu-bar-and-launcher-missing-after-installing-updates-16-04-lts

This is what helped me:

[general_ubuntu-lowgfx]
profile = unity-lowgfx

Thank you for your bug report. It's not clear what you change and try exactly. Do you turn on the launcher setting and restart your session? Does unity fails to start or do you just fail to trigger the launcher by hitting the left border in a vm? (that doesn't seem to work for me but it's the same in stock 16.04 and with the update)s

I guess I don't understand your question concerning what I changed. My change was to upgrade a perfectly good 16.04 image that functioned perfectly and after the upgrade and subsequent reboot there was no louncher and if I started Netbeans 8.1 (a desktop icon) or started a terminal session, both would start, neither were draggable.

It's unclear to me why the importance went from undecided to High (which, yeah, I agree with as it's a major functionality regression, the status from new to incomplete. I gave perfectly reproduceable steps. As for what daemon or process is running I don't know. I am guessing it would take less than 30 mins to have an 'in the lab' reproduction' of the issue. In other words, this is not a wedge use case.

As for your question about turning on the autohide and restarting. I did that too but as soon as I set no to yes, the problem existed. Uppon reboot, it still existed. I hope that makes sense. What else would you like? Oh, apport started throwing exceptions when I used it to create this bug so perhaps everything it was supposed to provide was missing.

Sorry but things are not clear, your description sounds like unity stopped loading but those are contradictory statements

"My change was to upgrade a perfectly good 16.04 image that functioned perfectly and after the upgrade and subsequent reboot there was no louncher"

and "I turned autohide to on and voilà."

Does it happen if you install a stock 16.04.1 or or 16.04 and upgrade it without changing any setting? Or does it only do it if you change the launcher settings?

Do you get a .crash in /var/crash? If so could you report it with ubuntu-bug so informations can be collected, attaching it to a bug doesn't help us to get the needed details

OK, I did describe two steps to reproduce. In the original case, it was an existing 16.01 current with maintenance, that I in-place upgraded. As it was existing I had already switched the launcher from autohide=off to autohide=yes as well I already had a desktop icon. so there were two artefacts of the upgrade, 1) no access to launcher and 2) applications on the desktop were functional but there were not dragable by the window's title bar. In order to determine if that was an upgrade bug or a 16.04.1 bug I created a fresh vm of JUST 16.04.1 and could reproduce the initial symptom of the launcher being absent but the terminal window (context menu->new terminal) was drag-able.

There was a crash file in the first case of upgrading an existing current 16.04 vm. I can get it to submit.

Sorry, I can NOT get it to submit.

hum, ok, I can't confirm here in a virtualbox image nor by forcing the lowgfx profile on a normal session

what error do you get if you try to submit the bug? can you clean the directory and try again to see if a new report is generated?

There is this guy..
http://askubuntu.com/questions/802468/menu-bar-and-launcher-missing-after-installing-updates-16-04-lts

which addresses virtualbox specifically.

It wouldn't submit, literally nothing happened. Now that was under a 16.04 image that was upgraded to 16.04.1.

When I did a fresh 16.04.1 install into VirtManager, yes, it worked, right up until I set launcher to autohide, then it was good night Charlie Brown. . If you are not using an existing 16.04(.0) image then you can't reproduce the issue. But, as you can see from the above URL, someone else reported the very same upgrade problem as I did.

SOmething you should take a look at is 1001255, that is likely the culprit, with the exception of unable to move windows, as I reported as well as the above url.

Are there no launchpad bugs opened against 16.04.1 re: immovable desktop windows? Being a VM I am guessing the image's concept of its video device is done externally like spice/qxl. Remember, when you first boot a new image, the launcher is set to autohide=no. Turning autohide=yes will immediately create the issue. As I mentioned im my comment in the above askubuntu issue, renaming that subdir simply restores the laucher, it does not fix autohide=yes.

Ah, very interesting! I brought that image back and the suggested 'fix' of removing .config/compiz-1 restores the launcher but disables any effect of setting the autohide. I showed it as autohide on yet the launcher was visbile. I did restore setting, which turned autohide=off and then switched it to on and it is showing, regardless of what I do.

I thought I'd try it with a different browser. I see chrome is not an option so I tried the ubuntu brand browser...it won't let me choose the file to attach. This stuff, your bug-ubuntu needs some work. This is crazy. I just tried firefox again and it allows me to choose files but the Submit Bug Report button is inop.

It appears I can provide no further information. The other thing Sebastien, if you can not reproduce the bug, you can't verify the fix.

This is a critical bug for me. I can not upgrade existing 14.04 desktops if doing so breaks them.

Hooray Hooray.. problem # is 1607070. I hope that helps Sebastien.

The file did not allow read access, which caused the submit to fail.