Dock Disappeared after using optimus-manager

Support Graphics & Display
1

Hello

After runninng optimus-manager --switch-nvidia my dock has disappeared. I can only access it through the meta key. Any ideas on what could be the issue?

2

My dock is completely missing now, doesn’t matter if I switch graphics cards. I can’t access it without pressing the meta key

3

Does this also happen when you log into a newly created user? (E.G. vanced2)

:thinking:

5

Nope, everything is working fine with my dock for a newly created user

6

So you have an issue in your user profile and finding out which exact setting you changed is going to take weeks if not months, therefore, we’re going to do the following:

  • Verify that the new user has access to the same groups as your old one by executing groups and comparing the output of both users.

    groups twitty
groups twitty2

    (Where obviously, twitty is your old user and twitty2 is your new one.)
    E.G. if twitty is a member of operator and twitty2 isn’t, execute:

    usermod --append --groups operator twitty2

  • Copy all data files from your old profile into your new one

    cp --verbose --recursive --preserve=timestamps /home/twitty/Documents/* /home/twitty2/Documents/

    If that worked and you had no errors, remove the documents from your old user:

    rm --recursive /home/twitty/Documents/*

    repeat for:

    • Pictures
    • Videos
    • Music
    • .thunderbird
    • .mozilla/firefox/
    • Templates, and everything else that is important to you.
    • Linux games like Battle of Wesnoth have their game data stored under ~/.local/share/ E.G. ~/.local/share/wesnoth/

  • After everything has been copied over, disable the old user so you cannot accidentally log on to it any more:

    usermod --lock twitty

  • If you would have theming going on, don’t do everything in one day but do this at the rate of 1 application / theme / whatever per day and if the same issue crops up again, roll back your last change and thus you’ve now pinpointed the exact setting that made your old user misbehave. :thinking:

  • in 1 month delete the entire home directory of your old user, but don’t delete the user itself so that in 6 months time files still owned by that user will still show up under its username.

  • If you ever migrate to a new machine, just don’t migrate the old user: only the new one.

  • From now on, start making backups so you can roll back and never have to do this again:

7