Zoom, the video meeting 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 setting up
Arch Linux on my work rig again, I added Zoom, and lo and behold, Zoom would not 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 could not 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 how it was licensed, and from time to time, is necessary to
run apps, even if you’re running GNOME, as I am.
What was interesting is that I would have expected Qt to be automatically added as part of the Zoom package. Sadly that wasn’t the case at all, and I had to install it myself. I suspect maybe it was listed as optional when adding 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