I'm running Ubuntu MATE 16.04. I want that when I login to my desktop, the bluetooth should be off by default (though the icon should be available in system tray so that I can switch it on whenever I want).

I've tried adding rfkill block bluetooth to the /etc/rc.local but it ain't working. Any suggestions?

I found this
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BluetoothSetup
which shows that you need to edit /etc/default/bluetooth to alter
HIDD_ENABLED=1
to
HIDD_ENABLED=0

First, stop the service:

sudo systemctl stop bluetooth.service

Then disable it:

sudo systemctl disable bluetooth.service

Check:

sudo systemctl status bluetooth.service
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this is taken from http://askubuntu.com/questions/74464...and-not-upstar
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To disable it so it never tries to restart (as other apps may be trying to start it after you've disabled it and will show up with errors in the journal log) after stopping and disabling bluetooth.service, you can this points the symlink to /dev/null. To restore it Found this at: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledg...sdisabling.htm

In Arch, to get dbus (via systemd) to stop calling to dbus-org.bluez.service (after masking as per above) I had to remove these packages and had to force remove at least two of them: pacman -Rdd to force those that have breakable dependencies. Recompile NetworkManager without the bluez-libs dependency will satisfy this error message and dbus no longer tries to load masked bluetooth every few minutes. Keep in mind you're responsible for maintaining the custom package next time NetworkManager upgrade is available. To go completely toothless be sure to install the recompiled libnm and libnm-glib packages that build with NetworkManager.