Ubuntu Linux

Some applications and games built with OpenGL support and packaged as Flatpak fail to start with proprietary Nvidia drivers. This article explains how to get such Flatpak applications or games them to start, without installing the open source drivers (Nouveau).

The idea of using application containers in GNOME was first proposed in 2013 by Lennart Poettering (a rather annoying fella), who published an article about it in 2014. Developed as part of the freedesktop.org project (formerly known as X Desktop Group or XDG), it was originally called xdg-app.

As of February 2017, some popular apps available as Flatpaks include Blender, Gimp, LibreOffice, Pitivi, KDE Applications, Linphone, and GNOME Recipes. There are also some unofficial Flatpaks such as development versions of Mozilla Firefox, Skype, and Spotify.

Check out how to fix Flatpak software failing to start on system with proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers on Linux Uprising blog.

Use this if you get an error similar to the following (when trying to start a Flatpak app that is built with OpenGL support):

libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
Could not initialize GLX