Update: This ‘trick’ still works for newer versions of Eclipse (e.g. mars, neon, oxygen) and Ubuntu versions (14.10, 15.04, 15.10, 16.04, 16.10). I’m using ‘rolling’ updates so I’ve tested most versions mentioned above.

I recently installed Eclipse ‘Luna’ on an Ubuntu 14.04 system and encountered a few display issues. Eclipse was rendered unusable for some GTK reasons…

It took me a while to find a somewhat related blog post that led me to a solution for the missing views and errors when starting Eclipse.

In case of starting Eclipse from a console two environment variables need to be set in advance  to avoid a corrupted Eclipse window:

export SWT_GTK3=0
export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0

In my case I created a desktop entry ~/.local/share/applications/eclipse.desktop to facilitate the startup. Adapt it to your needs:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=4.4
Name=Eclipse
Comment=Eclipse IDE
Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 SWT_GTK3=0 /home/kai/eclipse/eclipse
Icon=/home/kai/eclipse/icon.xpm
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Utility;Application