After login screen in Ubuntu no desktop is displayed - yet same login screen

I have been fiddling around much lately and that included an update to Ubuntu 14.04 (as well as playing with BlackMagic IntensityPro capture card - installing webcamstudio, recompiling vlc, etc). So when I restarted I could not get to my gnome-desktop, nor any other desktop I wanted. Also my i3-desktop was completely messed up and I wondered why. Anyway the symptom was that after I typed my login credentials, the login interface vanished but desktop did not load. Instead after few 10 seconds the screen went black and I was back on login screen. After checking logs I have noticed that graphics card driver is working as it should (guide to install NVIDIA drivers), but I have noticed in syslog that permission for user home folder is causing a problem. It was fast check of permissions for my home folder with

ls -al /home/
# home folder in Linux should be owned by same user and same group and that is of course owner of
# that account.
# in case it is not then you should run (change user to your account username)
sudo chown user:user /home/user

This was a quick fix. Remember /home folder is owned by root, yet all other subfolders should be owned by each respective users otherwise desktops will not have permissions to open your config files and will not be able to load.

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