AppImage crashes with SIGTRAP on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (glibc 2.39, t64)

Bug Reports
1

Problem

When attempting to run the latest cursor.AppImage on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (glibc 2.39, with t64 transition), the application fails to start as a regular user. It crashes immediately with a SIGTRAP, even when disabling Electron’s sandbox using:

./cursor.AppImage --no-sandbox
# or extracted:
./squashfs-root/usr/share/cursor/cursor --no-sandbox

This makes the AppImage currently incompatible with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, likely due to the newer glibc version and changes in t64 ABI transition.

Environment

  • OS: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat)
  • glibc: 2.39 with t64 transition
  • Kernel: 6.8.0-■■-generic
  • Architecture: x86_64
  • Cursor AppImage version: Latest available on GitHub Releases as of report
  • Electron Version (inferred): Embedded via AppImage

What happens

:technologist: As regular user

./cursor.AppImage --no-sandbox
  • App crashes immediately.
  • Running with gdb confirms a SIGTRAP:
Thread 1 "cursor" received signal SIGTRAP, Trace/breakpoint trap.
#0  0x000055555b5c3f86 in ?? ()
#1  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()

:man_technologist: As root (using sudo ./cursor.AppImage --no-sandbox)

  • The app opens, but:

    • It shows a warning: “It is not recommended to run Cursor as root.”
    • Any action that requires login or browser redirection fails.
    • Clicking “Sign in” does nothing.
    • The developer console shows repeated failed requests (404 Not Found) to:
https://api2.cursor.sh/auth/poll?uuid=...
  • Even setting a default browser (xdg-settings set default-web-browser chromium.desktop) has no effect.
  • The login is broken due to missing xdg-open behavior in root environment (likely DBus/XDG context missing).

Screenshot (run as root):

Image
Image1365×693 115 KB

Diagnosis

This appears to be a combination of:

  1. AppImage incompatibility with glibc 2.39 (Ubuntu 24.04) — causing immediate crash in non-root execution, even with --no-sandbox.

  2. Login issues when running as root, because:

    • Cursor cannot trigger external browser login flow.
    • No DBus session or xdg-open is available in root environment.
    • xdg-open or gio open calls silently fail.

Suggested solutions

  • :white_check_mark: Rebuild the AppImage for compatibility with glibc 2.39 / Ubuntu 24.04+.
  • :white_check_mark: Or, provide a .deb or snap package that integrates cleanly with system libraries and login flow.
  • :white_check_mark: Ensure proper Electron sandbox fallback in newer environments with t64.

Thank you!

Cursor is an amazing project and I really appreciate the effort — hope this helps improve the Linux experience with the latest distributions.