My MATLAB launcher doesn't work

Try specifying the full path in the launcher you are using.

So for example if the output of which matlab is /usr/bin/matlab, then change the Exec field to

Exec=/usr/bin/matlab -desktop

Note that if this does solve the issue for you it's likely because you have a script called matlab that is shadowing the original matlab command and so perhaps matlab is not receiving the -desktop flag which it needs to run when launched without a terminal.

See this entry for more details about getting the launcher to start properly by using -desktop.

If for some reason you still get nothing, try setting the type field to terminal application to diagnose the problem further.

I had this same problem and many of the fixes I found didn't work. Here was the solution I finally came to using Ubuntu 14.04 with MATLAB 2016a.

MATLAB opens from the terminal fine, so find out what is being called for that command:

> which matlab
/usr/local/bin/matlab

Then to actually create the icon, I just launched MATLAB from the terminal

> matlab

and when the icon appeared in the launcher, I right clicked on it and clicked 'Lock to Launcher'. Here is where my solution diverged from a lot of the other solutions. Instead creating a .desktop file in /usr/local/applications, I actually had to modify the one that was created in ~/.local/share/applications

> gedit ~/.local/share/applications/matlab_r2016a.desktop

and modified the file to

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=MATLAB R2016a
Icon=matlab_r2016a.png
Path=/home/username
Exec=/usr/local/bin/matlab -desktop
StartupNotify=true
StartupWMClass=MATLAB R2016a
OnlyShowIn=Unity;
X-UnityGenerated=true

where the Path points to your home directory and the Exec is whatever which matlab returned plus the flag -desktop