I recently switched to Ubuntu from Windows as I got tired of having to deal with Windows BS about drivers causing BSOD and it getting messed up almost every week. Everything was working fine until today I wanted to open gnome-disks and it wouldn’t launch I got the loading mouse animation but nothing. I then tried to open the terminal same thing, ctrl alt-tab still nothing. Luckily I had the shell extension to open a drop-down terminal with ~ and typing gnome-disks there opens it perfectly fine. Its the same story with Nautilus, Backups, videos. The strange thing is it seems only those 4 apps don’t work, everything else seems fine , settings open so does software center.
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Just to clarify you can open third party apps? Also try gedit and see if its a gnome issue specifically.
I would also try running in xorg, since you are probably running wayland right now (you choose in login). This seems to be the most likely situation.
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If you can launch the apps from a terminal, then the apps aren’t the issue. I’d guess a temporary problem with the GUI, especially if you have launched these apps successfully before. A reboot might clear things up. If not, there’s not enough info to go by. (Assuming you haven’t changed something yourself.)
(18.10 defaults to Xorg.)
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Thanks for all the responses. Gedit also seems not to work. I can open other apps like chrome, firefox and even some built-in apps like settings and startup disk and software center. I tried rebooting and the issue still persists. I tried login in with gnome-classic selected instead of Ubuntu and all these apps now seem to work fine, however switching back to the default breaks it again. Also, I guess around the same time I started to have issues with these apps sound stopped working. If I go to sound settings there are no outputs even in gnome-classic. I haven’t changed anything recently I am still using an LG ultrawide connected through HDMI to my GeForce 1080 and a Logitech G933. At this point I’m thinking I am going to have to reinstall ubuntu from scratch 
Update: I been trying to get sound to work and I have been following this guide https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure
and this is what the ALSA script mentioned returns
http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=58d4c9d7a17242419cbae11a5df1486197ff53c1
werid thing is the sript seemed to detect my audio devices just fine and spposibly says that pulseaudio is working as well
Pulseaudio is a wierd beast, it is often hard to debug. I was not aware you were having a sound issue? Can you please be a bit more detailed on what issues you are having.
Ok to basically this all happened in the last two day. Some gnome apps such as the terminal and files opening through the GUI had to open them with a different terminal. Next I noticed that in my sound settings I have no devices connected. Then today I tried using the gnome-default WM and the apps worked perfectly but in the sound settings I only found a sound device that said something about chrome remote desktop. Next I switched back to the Ubuntu wm and I still had the app issues. Next I tried to go though the tutorial here
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure
To no avail. After this I noticed the app problem got worse , now software center and other previously working apps now do not launch through the GUI ,even if I try I different window manager
It’s a weird bug, had the same issues on Ubuntu but not on Fedora… still, after an update like a week ago fixed it and still no issues.
Ok so I read somewhere interesting appently the newer gigabyte motherboards have issues with linux.
I have the x470 ultra gaming on bios F3.
I read there that updating to the 14.9 kernel could fix it.
I’m also going to try to update to the latest bios that came out a few days ago. I’ll update after a few days saying how it went. BTW I should also probably mention this but I uninstalled Ubuntu and I’m going to be reinstalling either Ubuntu again or KDE neon. I was trying Manjaro and I didn’t like it.
Edit: I should also mention that I also had slow boot issues and hangs but they were minor so I ignore them this might be why.
OK so Installed Ubuntu 18.04 and had to update the kernel to 4.19.8 as the default kernel had issues with my hardware as I mentioned above. After configuring all my apps again I got the same issue, some gnome apps would not launch and sound no longer works. Thinking it might be a software conflict I uninstalled all my recent apps one by one with a reboot in between to test. Surprisingly I found the culprit. Chrome-remote desktop. I reinstalled all the packages minus chrome remote desktop and everything works. This even fixes another issue were chrome would seem to delete my user profile. How do I report this issue?
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Sorry for late reply,
https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/report-ubuntu-bug.html.en
Is probably your best bet, since its hard to report bugs to google.
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Thanks for your help