Ubuntu Unity running slow after update, not opening certain programs

Question

Okay, so to preface this I'm a noob in Linux so I don't know how to figure out which packages might have broken my system.

So yesterday evening I installed an update and later noticed that I couldn't open Steam. It runs with the following error message:

aleks@aleks-HP-G62-Notebook-PC:~$ steam -v
Running Steam on ubuntu 14.04 64-bit
STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(1454620878)
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(1454620878)
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(1454620878)
assert_20160216122735_1.dmp[6603]: Uploading dump (out-of-process)
/tmp/dumps/assert_20160216122735_1.dmp
/home/aleks/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh: line 756:  6592 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) $STEAM_DEBUGGER "$STEAMROOT/$STEAMEXEPATH" "$@"
assert_20160216122735_1.dmp[6603]: Finished uploading minidump (out-of-process): success = yes
assert_20160216122735_1.dmp[6603]: response: CrashID=bp-171b3f26-2006-46bf-b5fa-e4bd82160216
assert_20160216122735_1.dmp[6603]: file ''/tmp/dumps/assert_20160216122735_1.dmp'', upload yes: ''CrashID=bp-171b3f26-2006-46bf-b5fa-e4bd82160216''

Also, when I try opening unity-control-center it also gives me a segmentation fault error.

In addition, Unity(the graphical interface of Ubuntu, correct me if I'm wrong!) seems to be running rather slowly and the CPU is nearly always maxed out whereas usually that isn't the case.

My uneducated guess is that one of the updates somehow affected my graphical drivers, but I don't know.

If this is relevant I'm using an AMD system(laptop specifically).

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Alrighty, since I didn't get any sort of answers to this question I decided to give this some sort of sense of conclusion by writing up what I did. Hopefully, it may be helpful to someone else later on.

So what I figured out was that one of the PPAs has broken my graphics drivers and thus Unity couldn't function. Basically, I have carelessly enabled too many PPAs and thus couldn't figure out what was the culprit. I spent a lot of time uninstalling and then installing Xserver, lightdm, various desktop environments and everything else I figured could be related to the problem so it was pretty clear that there was an underlying problem with the graphics driver. Funnily enough, Openbox did work but I guess it's because it's such a minimalistic DE.

In the end I opted to reinstall Ubuntu whilst keeping my /home folder intact. This was a pretty easy solution and I wish I had done this after the first 1-2 hours of digging inside Ubuntu since it's relatively effortless. For people that wish to go the same route, make sure you use the same username and password for your new account as you did with your old one and mount your old home partition as /home without formatting it.