Comment 5 for bug 1604657

Having a chance to look at things more closely, Unity definitely appears to be running. (By this I mean compiz started with the Unity plugin, and unity-panel-service is running.) Running unity from the command-line stops and restarts everything, but the desktop remains blank.

However, running unity -v (according to the source for unity.cmake this calls compiz with --debug) *does* restore things. I've also gotten a desktop by running compiz --replace. Issues persist upon rebooting, however. As previously mentioned, this includes steps like deleting .cache and .config, resetting things in dconf, and other standard workarounds for blank desktop issues. I also tried purging and reinstalling essentially the entire graphical stack, without success. That suggests the issues might be with the default settings, yet they don't show up on a fresh 16.04 installation on the same platform.

I'm stumped and migrating to fresh VMs. I'll keep a copy of the troublesome VM around for a few months in case the issue is confirmed or someone has a bright idea.