How to fix blank screen (no icons) after login in Ubuntu 14.04/ Ubuntu 16.04?

Shreya Singh
1 min readJun 26, 2018

Recently I was trying to install and uninstall certain packages and I encountered an error after I restarted my system after login, it was blank, no icons at all. I suggest you not to tamper with the Nvidia drivers but try these basic solutions instead.

Solutions to fix this:

Solution 1: See if this works for you

First, open terminal by CTRL+ALT+F1

sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo reboot

Solution 2: If the above doesn’t work, try this

First, open terminal by CTRL+ALT+F1

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install unity
sudo shutdown -r now

Solution 3: If none of the above work for you, try this:
None of the above worked for me however, so I upgraded my Ubuntu from 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04. All my previous files were preserved.

  1. First, open terminal by CTRL+ALT+F1
  2. sudo do-release-upgrade

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Shreya Singh

Software Development Engineer at Amazon, Google APAC Women Techmaker Scholar, C.S.E. Graduate @ NIT Patna