Today my 14.04 updated itself not requiring a reboot. After a while I rebooted because of other reasons and then I was pleasantly surprised by a blank screen.

I have tried everything I could think about including

• Reinstalled compiz, unity, ubuntu-desktop, xorg
• Reinstalled and then removed the nvidia driver

So far nothing has worked. Except for one little thing: my cairo-dock is showing. And that's all.

I tried with Unity doesn't load, no Launcher, no Dash appears, but none of the answers there helped me. I also tried removing my ~/.Xauthority file and it still doesn't work.

Does anybody know what else I could try?

UPDATE:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
sudo service lightdm stop
sudo service lightdm start

When I run that code and then login again the icons on the desktop are displayed but the menu and the launcher are still not there.

Also, when I try to run an application from CTRL + ALT + F1 such as dconf reset -f /org/compiz/ it says Cannot autolaunch D-Bus without X11 $DISPLAY

I can only run applications with export DISPLAY=:0