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
As regular user
./cursor.AppImage --no-sandbox
- App crashes immediately.
- Running with
gdb
confirms aSIGTRAP
:
Thread 1 "cursor" received signal SIGTRAP, Trace/breakpoint trap.
#0 0x000055555b5c3f86 in ?? ()
#1 0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
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):
Diagnosis
This appears to be a combination of:
-
AppImage incompatibility with glibc 2.39 (Ubuntu 24.04) — causing immediate crash in non-root execution, even with
--no-sandbox
. -
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
orgio open
calls silently fail.
Suggested solutions
Rebuild the AppImage for compatibility with glibc 2.39 / Ubuntu 24.04+.
Or, provide a
.deb
orsnap
package that integrates cleanly with system libraries and login flow.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.