This is a bug in MATLAB R2017b (and later) that affects Ubuntu 17.04 (and later). Since the release of Ubuntu 17.04, the libgconf-2.so.4 library does not get installed unless it was already on the system prior to an upgrade. However, this library is needed by the Live Editor in order to run.
As a workaround, run the following command in the terminal to install the missing library:
sudo apt-get install libgconf2-4
Two other workarounds to try on an Ubuntu 24.04 machine (currently known in MATLAB R2024a) are:
1) Remove libstdc++.so.6 from the MATLAB R2024a area. It may also need to be removed from a MATLAB user's own ~/.MathWorks/ directory tree.
or
2) Set the env variable LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 when invoking MATLAB, which will hopefully force the system to prefer the system libstdc++.so.6 over the MATLAB copy.
