Just to correct myself on my previous-to-last comment: killing might not be necessary after all. I was able to make a stuck launcher start working again by switching between some windows. It definitely doesn’t work with just any two windows (tried this on the other desktop still exhibiting this) but which ones matter, I can’t tell yet.

Hi Gerry. Here’s output on my desktop:
jani@saegusa:~$ gsettings get com.canonical.Unity2d.Launcher hide-mode
1

Here’s output on my laptop, which is also affected:
jani@lemmikki:~$ gsettings get com.canonical.Unity2d.Launcher hide-mode
2

(I’ve changed the setting myself using dconf-editor on my desktop but not on my laptop, IIRC.)

Amusingly, it’s as if that query now triggered the issue at hand: launcher is currently stuck visible on both computers as I’m typing this. Let me try… No, unfortunately it was apparently just a coincidence: I couldn’t reproduce it with the gsettings command deliberately again after killing the stuck U2D.

(For the ”launcher getting stuck despite autohide being set” part, see bug #940590.)

I can confirm this is an issue, though I can’t reproduce it with Nicholas’ recipe. Not sure what double-clicking should do, here it works just as single-clicking does (bringing the group of windows to front in the order I left them). Thus I have no recipe to reproduce the issue, here it seems to happen seemingly at random. It is quite frequent though, happens multiple times a day and after it’s triggered nothing short of killall unity-2d-shell fixes it.

I believe this started with the recentmost big Unity updates, 5.4 I think. It wasn’t present in prior versions.

Confirming the issue of not being able to get rid of indicator-messages apart from uninstalling it system-wide, but not agreeing with stuffing the menu with another item just for solving this. IMHO Indicator-messages should be de-/selectable in Startup Applications preferences (like indicator-multiload for instance is).

According to an answer on Ask Ubuntu [1], blacklisting all message-providers should hide indicator-messages altogether, but this doesn’t seem to work in 12.04, apparently because status-providers (which are different from message-providers) are still using the menu. (U1 Control Panel also seems to still occupy it despite being blacklisted.)

I’ve even tried overriding indicator-messages’ dbus service file with a hackish solution [2], but the envelope still insists on appearing (though without the associated menu).

* [1] http://askubuntu.com/a/15616/34756
* [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=544483#42

I just had the brightest idea. Two actually:
1. Make the launcher fill itself automatically with the most frequently used apps.
2. Make the launcher infinite in size so that you could (theoretically, should you want to) scroll down to every app you’ve ever launched that the infrastructure knows of.

==Severity==
I’ll elaborate on the justification below based on my use case. Depending on whether it’s a common or a less common one, this report is to be read as severity ’wishlist’ for a system default or an optional feature (an add-on or whatever they’re called in Unity-land).

==Justification==
The way I currently seem to be intuitively using the launcher, manually, is to stack it with apps I use most, with the most used one on top and less used ones descending according to use-frequency down from there.

This is at least an implicit, sometimes explicit [1] use case for the launcher, and something at which computers are by nature better than humans. So why not make the launcher do this automatically?

* [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/ReleaseNotes#Ubuntu_Netbook_Edition

==Requirements==
Sometime in the past (see Bug #893214), the dash seems to have had a ’most frequently used apps’ category, apparently based on Zeitgeist. So the basic infrastructure for this should already exist.

==Affected==
I’m filing this against unity-2d-shell, since that’s what I’m using, but I suppose this applies to 3D as well. Ayatana might be the abstract-level target.

This happened to me just now. I killed u2d-shell, because it was rendering wrong already: it left a white vertical column when hiding, obscuring the view to the app underneath. When it restarted, the launcher was only 7,5 icons high (looks like Lohith’s screenshot, though slightly higher). Neither of these symptoms have occurred prior to this.

A new `killall unity-2d-shell` fixed the issue for this session.

After upgrading Unity to 5.4, the launcher regularly gets stuck on the side despite being set to hide automatically both in Appearance settings and dconf. It does hide initially as it should, but then eventually no longer does and just stays there on top, blocking that part of the app underneath it. It usually then freezes after some time, then crashes and restarts, after which the autohide again works for a while. Before the freeze it does otherwise work save for the autohiding.

This is the report generated from such a crash. I have a feeling the freezing/crashing can be triggered by scrolling the launcher contents (when it’s in the ”stuck” mode).

Not reproducible under Unity 3D.

Happens at least daily. Nothing I do in particular to pinpoint as the trigger. Now that the crash has occurred, the lens doesn’t seem to work (clicking the files it shows does nothing). I’ll try it again on another session prior to the SIGSEGV happening.

This is a terse report, I know, but I’ll provide any additional info anyone might care to ask for if needed.