I’ve been running into this really frustrating problem for a while where after running for a while (on the order of days - just happened and uptime reports 10 days), I can no longer launch any GUI applications, and in some cases can’t even open new windows in already running applications, but otherwise any already running applications work just fine.
At that point, rebooting is the easiest solution to keep using my system like normal.
Trying to launch any GUI-based applications from the command line gives me an error like:
Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified
qt.qpa.xcb: could not connect to display :0
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “” even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, xcb.
From some digging around, I found some indication that this might be related to Xauthority, and sure enough, both of the most recent times this has happened I checked xauth and got:
xauth: file /tmp/xauth_EfbeJl does not exist
And I did confirm that the file does not exist at this point, but I did see it shortly after boot, so it was deleted somewhere in between.
Kind of a shot in the dark, but is it possible there’s some automated clean up of /tmp/ going on that’s deleting this file after some period of time? I haven’t manually set up anything to do that, are there likely culprits that I can disable? (I don’t want this to happen anyways - it’s already on tmpfs, clearing on reboot is good enough for me.)