Comment 6 for bug 1831280

The good news is, after rebooting, the issue is gone.
So this is probably one of the many things in Ubuntu that randomly and sporadically begin to fail, perhaps because of some service or program crashing or whatever, that get "fixed" at the next reboot. I wish I knew a less aggressive way to get this "fixed" than rebooting the next time it happens.

> I note you're using 16.04 which was upgraded from a previous install

Yep, which in turn was upgraded from a previous install and so on over the years (I think it might go back to 12.x... no, that can't be right, I dunnow...). I certainly don't fresh-install the whole OS every time a new major release comes out. Actually I wonder why we still even have to deal with major releases and distribution upgrades, and can't just keep the OS up to date continuously with regular updates. It seems to me such an obsolete design. I know there are distros out there that have that, but I don't think there's any that is mature and works well.

And by the way, I'm stuck with 16.04 and don't upgrade mainly because of #1164016, which would make my life absolutely miserable (luckily I learned that regressed before I actually upgraded).

But anyway, I'm rambling.

Something that would be useful in order to get this issue diagnosed is this: does anybody know if there's a particular process, service or something that, by crashing, would cause this issue, i.e. the top menus to disappear for some applications? Particularly, that would affect gedit, nautilus, filezilla, terminal, gimp among others, but NOT chrome, tortoiseHG (also among others). Knowing that might help narrowing this down, and also might give us a workaround hopefully better than a reboot for when this happens.

I remember that restarting gnome-settings-daemon (by killing it, it restarts itself), which I sporadically have to do because of #1188569, systematically causes many things in Nautilus to go berserk, INCLUDING the top menu to disappear. But that would always get fixed by restarting nautilus (after closing any instance of it including the one that's responsible for the desktop), while in this case it didn't.

Another thing that might help: this likely happened after resuming from hibernation (resuming from hibernation is an agony every single time, it randomly triggers countless bugs, including the abovementioned 1188569, and sometimes forces me to physically power off the computer as the only way out).