Zoom failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized
Zoom, the video conferencing app, has been part of my work stack for quite a while now. Love it or hate it, it's probably here to stay. Upon reinstalling Arch Linux on my work rig, I installed Zoom, and lo and behold, Zoom wouldn't launch.
This was a fairly blind interaction when launching the app from GNOME, so I turned to my trusty terminal and tried to launch it from there. Upon doing so, I was greeted with a lovely error about how Qt couldn't be initialized:
Client: Breakpad is using Single Client Mode! client fd = -1
99 │ qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was fo
│ und.
100 │ This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. R
│ einstalling the application may fix this problem.
101 │
102 │ Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, w
│ ayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, xcb.
103 │
104 │ zoom was exited due to a handled signal: 6
105 │ ZoomLauncher exit.Qt, is the graphical user interface library that drives KDE, has had a lot of controversy in the past over licensing, and from time to time, is necessary to run apps, even if you're running GNOME, as I am.
What was perplexing is that I would have expected Qt to be installed as a dependency of the Zoom package. Sadly that wasn't the case at all, and I had to manually install it. I suspect maybe it was listed as an optional dependency when installing Zoom, but even that doesn't sound right since it's not really optional.
So to get Qt installed, you just need to install the qt5-base package, and
then Zoom will started up as expected:
% yay -S qt5-base