Unity problem? missing launch bar and severe flickering of windows/icons

Question

what works:

- background wallpaper is shown correctly
- mouse seems to behave normally

what doesn't work:

- none of the launch bars is visible
- desktop icons flicker between their correct position and
  a place just a bit to the left and down
- open windows flicker, moving down a bit each time
  upon hitting the bottom monitor border, they stop moving but continue flickering
- right-click menu is placed correctly but briefly turns invisible while flicker occurs
- all flickering seems to occur in a one second interval

System:

- OS: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (freshly installed on previously blank drive)
- Processor: Intel i7-6700K
- Graphics: NVidia GTX970
- Mainboard: MSI Z170A

The PC has no network connection right now, so i am unable to download/install packages...

If any other information is useful, please say so.

Answer 1

After some research I found out, that I fell victim to the following bug:

bugs.launchpad.net->llvm-toolchain-bug

Summarized: The version of the package libllvm3.8 which is distributed with Ubuntu 16.04 crashes on certain mixes of NVidia GPUs and Skylake CPUs. This is already fixed for later versions of the package.

Therefore a simple update as done below should fix the problem in 99% of cases.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Answer 2

Did you ever figure out what the problem was? This exact behavior just started happening to me since the latest update on 16.04. I don't know if this helps, but going through

/var/log/apt/history.log

it seems that the latest update (which caused the problem) changed the following packages

snapd
gnome-shell-common
libnm-gtk-common
network-manager-gnome
libnma0
libnma-common
libnm-gtk0

So I guess that one of these is causing the problem. I'll try reverting to a previous version for each of these packages one by one to see if it helps.

Hope you sorted it out on your end, if not I hope that this may help you...

Have a good one!